During the revolutionary decade of the 1640s Thomas Collier emerged from his native Somerset to become a significant Particular Baptist leader. He produced more than a score of books and established numerous churches. Collier was a well-known controversialist who debated opponents on subjects such as baptism and the ordination of lay preachers. Collier's theology was worked out in the heat of such debates and must be studied against that landscape to be properly understood. Collier's writings and career reveal surprising willingness to embrace heterodox theological positions by Particular Baptist standards, especially in the late 1640s and after 1660. In the early period of his career he was enaroured of an allegorical, spiritualizing method of biblical interpretation and after 1660 he became increasingly hostile to limited atonement and election. The most orthodox phase of Collier's career was the period between 1653 and 1659 when he served as the leader of the Particular Baptists' Western Association. Under his leadership the association produced their Somerset Confession in 1656. After the Restoration Collier's disputes were increasingly with his fellow Particular Baptists. The publication of his Body of Divinity in 1674 and his Additional Word as a supplement to it in 1676 revealed increasingly divergent soteriological and eschatological views from those being espoused by the Particular Baptists. An attempt was made to discipline Collier by the London Baptist leadership, which was strongly and successfully resisted by Collier and his supporters within his local church in Southwick, Wiltshire. Collier's 1678 Confession of Faith, written in response to the London Baptists' adaptation of the Westminster Confession published the previous year, illustrated the wide breach of doctrine that had developed between Collier and his denominational colleagues.

From the beginning of the Reformation until the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, there was brisk and far-reaching cultural interaction between England and German-speaking states. Towards the end of this period, the Englische Komoedianten (EK) - itinerant troupes of English actors and musicians - began a century of touring German courts and cities, with remarkable though neglected success. This thesis is a study of the first, truly English, phase of those tours, 1592-1620, arguing that the EK deserve recognition for their achievement as mediators between English and German cultures in their own right, not because of the remote possibility that they may have been the first to take Shakespeare to Germany. The thesis concentrates on a collection of EK plays, Engelische Comedien vnd Tragedien (1620), which contains a representative selection of their comedies, tragedies and "Singspiele", the genre associated with their clown, Pickelhering, the figure with whom they were most closely associated in the popular mind. There are five main sections: 1) A survey of scholarly attitudes to the EK; 2) A study of Anglo-German cultural relations in the sixteenth century; 3) The EK on tour, and their dealings with courts, cities and the church; 4) A study of four versions of perhaps the most popular of all fictions in Germany in the sixteenth century, Fortunatus, and his magic gifts, from its origins in the Augsburg Volksbuch (1509), through Hans Sachs (l553), Thomas Dekker (1599), to the EK themselves (1620): this is the one work which crosses from Germany to England and then back again during the century, changing and developing at each step; and 5) a detailed analysis of the 1620 collection of plays, according to questions of recognisability, socio-political immediacy, generic impurity and minimal staging. A brief investigation of English influences on Andreas Gryphius concludes the work.

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Dans le sillage des révolutions intellectuelles qui marquent l’avènement de l’époque moderne, Sir Kenelm Digby, catholique anglais, poursuit avec ardeur la connaissance du monde matériel et spirituel au gré des événements politiques qui ponctuent son époque tourmentée. À Londres comme à Paris où il est exilé, mais aussi au fil de ses nombreux voyages, Digby communique inlassablement des livres, échange des idées, et correspond sans relâche avec les savants de son époque comme Descartes, Hobbes, et Mersenne. Au sein du vaste réseau européen que constitue la jeune République des Lettres, il occupe une place de choix qui lui permet de produire une synthèse des idées en vogue. Digby participe à la sensibilité baroque que l’on définit non seulement par l’expression d’une crise liée à l’instabilité du monde et à la contradiction des choses mais aussi par la tentative de surmonter cette crise. Par ses intérêts variés pour l’alchimie, l’atomisme, la logique et la métaphysique, il tente de rendre compte, de façon baroque, du fonctionnement du monde et de l’homme afin d’en permettre la maîtrise et le gouvernement. Dans Two Treatises, il adopte et adapte l’hypothèse atomiste qui lui permet de dépeindre un monde fondamentalement chaotique, en changement permanent et agité d’une myriade de collisions invisibles qui expliquent la gravité et le magnétisme, mais aussi la reproduction ou la sympathie. Son approche démonstrative se veut un rempart contre la crise sceptique de son temps, et il ne cesse d’affirmer que la certitude est atteignable par les seuls moyens humains. Soucieux de prosélytisme, il met en relief la qualité orale de la tradition catholique et justifie la résurrection des corps, amenant au premier plan le sujet et ses perceptions, mais aussi la métamorphose comme principe explicatif clé. / In the wake of the intellectual revolutions of the early modern period, Sir Kenelm Digby, an English Catholic, endeavoured to increase the knowledge of the world, both physical and spiritual, against a backdrop of political turmoil. From London as from Paris, where he was in exile, the well-travelled Sir Kenelm sent books, communicated, and discussesd ideas tirelessly with the main thinkers of the time such as Descartes, Hobbes and Mersenne. His prominent place within the dense network of the incipient Republic of Letters allowed him to produce a seminal synthesis of the ideas then in circulation.Digby partook in the baroque sensitivity that we can define as the expression of a crisis linked to instability and contradiction, as well as the attempt to overcome it. Delving into alchemy, atomism, logic, and metaphysics, he strove to account for the secret workings of the world and of man in order to enable their mastery and government. In Two Treatises, he adopted and adapted the atomist hypothesis that allowed him to depict a deeply chaotic world, ridden with permanent change and fraught with innumerable and invisible clashes that explained all physical phenomena such as gravity, magnetism, generation, and sympathy. He aimed to proceed in a demonstrative manner so as to stave off the rampant crisis of scepticism, and he hammered through the idea that certainty was achievable by mere human means. In a proselyte effort, he tackled burning issues in the wake of the Reformation, promoting the oral quality of the Catholic tradition and the resurrection of bodies, while bringing forward the thinking individual and his perceptions, as well as the concept of metamorphosis, as key explanatory principles.

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