Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper considers the concept of ‘religion’ in Katherine Philips’s poems to her close women friends – Mary Aubrey (‘Rosania’) and Anne Owen (‘Lucasia’) – in the early 1650s, poems that find Philips adding a religious dimension to her more usual language of Platonic friendship. The paper argues that she does so in response to the religious conflict that embroiled her and her husband amidst Parliament’s efforts to propagate the gospel in Wales. The paper adds new historical information about the effects of the Propagation on Philips and about the marriage of Mary Aubrey, an event that Philips characterized as ‘apostasy’. If the Propagation set Philips to thinking about friendship between women as an alternative to sectarian conflict, Aubrey’s ‘apostasy’ obliged her to think in more nuanced ways about ecclesial power. Philips thus contributes to the archive of ecclesiological imagination that emerged from the 1650s.
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