Baptism and episcopalian piety in the English Civil War: Joseph Beaumont’s lyric poems

Abstract Joseph Beaumont's collection of devotional poetry, Minor Poems, exemplifies the development of an historically distinct form of baptismal piety developed among a number of episcopalian writers coping with the proscription of the Book of Common Prayer, episcopacy, and related forms of Cathedral-centered worship during the English Civil War. With public baptism according to the Book of Common Prayer outlawed, Episcopalians had occasion to develop new, more explicitly self-defining and often polemical, forms of baptismal commemoration. Developing the baptismal piety evident in George Herbert's The Temple (1633), Beaumont commemorated his own baptism as a way of maintaining fidelity to an established Church that had now gone into the wilderness, thus complementing the work of episcopalian writers such as Jeremy Taylor and John Cosin.