From the publisher : This book, the first study of Dryden's ideas to appear since 1934, presents a revolutionary reassessment of the poet's attitudes toward reason and faith. In challenging the long-accepted view that Dryden was a philosophical sceptic, Harth investigates the poet's intellectual forma- tion at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his early acquaintance with the ideals pur- sued by the Royal Society, and arrives at new and surprising conclusions. With particular emphasis on the elucidation of two of Dryden's longest and most important poems, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, the author analyzes Dryden's ideas and searches for individual historical contexts which precisely define the poet's thought. In this way, a single poem such as Religio Laici reveals a number of historical contexts otherwise lost if reduced to some convenient generalization about the poem's background or the poet's intellectual milieu. Harth uncovers for the first time the surprising story of the genesis of Religio Laici from modest beginnings, of the religious underworld in Restoration London which helped occasion it, and of Dryden's enormous and previously unsuspected debt to the work of one of his friends for much of the poem's content. In his study of the historical context of The Hind and the Panther, the author brings to light a deep and irreconcilable division in the ranks of Dryden's fellow Catholics which contributes a fresh perspective to the poet's own role as an apologist for his new religion.