In the process of negotiating among various definitions of the Baroque, I have tried to incorporate both stylistic and epochal approaches to this slippery concept, and most especially I have looked for places where gender plays an important role – or where issues of gender can be inserted into the discussion in places where it has hitherto been excluded or downplayed. Rather than being identifiable as a delimited historical period, the Baroque is a continuous transition, during which Europeans began to sense, if only rarely to fully articulate, the implications of the ominously emerging revolutions in cosmology, geography, historiography, medicine, and empirical science. The hyperbole and melancholy, the contradictory narratives and plateauing of Baroque culture, are the consequences of these underlying felt cultural changes, even among those individuals and communities resistant to or even ignorant of them.

My argument has been centred on viewing the Baroque specifically in English culture, through a taxonomy in part derived from Jose Antonio Maravall's Culture of the Baroque, supplemented by the concept of ‘plateauing’ derived from Gregory Bateson. Among the contradictions of Baroque culture, two powerful intertwined opposites have stood out – the Baroque's overwhelming reliance on hyperbole, not merely as a rhetorical device (certainly a recurring feature of Baroque style across the arts and in many everyday contexts ) but as ideological practice designed to generate elevated emotionality by means of extremity, exaggeration, excessiveness, and novelty; and its ostensible opposite (although almost inevitably accompanying it) a pervasive, at times obsessive, melancholy, an almost inevitable consequence of the multiplicity of hyperbole. That corrosive combination has often led to the ‘plateauing’ I see as a distinctive tendency in Baroque culture. Above all, perhaps, it needs to be emphasised that the term ‘Baroque’ does not point merely to surface stylistic effects but brings with it both residual ideological stands from the medieval world, and also anticipations of Enlightenment and even modern ‘dis-enchantment’. Often these ideological contraries co-exist, frequently in the same work, even the same poem, even the same sentence.

I have largely restricted myself to what to many scholars will still appear limiting, the notion of an English Baroque.