Paul Cefalu explores the relationship between ethical character and religious conversion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature.

Paul Cefalu is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration; 1. Guilt, shame, and moral character in early modern English theology and Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; 2. The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II; 3. Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker's natural law theory to Richard Sibbes's ethical occasion; 4. The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose; 5. Absent neighbors in George Herbert's 'The Church', or why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry; 6. Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries; Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood; Notes; Index.