The Protestant Baroque? If, as is conventionally assumed, the Baroque is closely aligned with the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, the phrase ‘Protestant Baroque’ sounds paradoxical, even impossible. The combination of ‘Protestant’ and ‘Baroque’ has become commonplace in the history of music: witness the works of J.S. Bach, in which the term loosely indicates that the composer was a Protestant, and that he wrote within what is even more loosely termed – indeed, this looseness is probably more pronounced than in any other area of cultural production – the Baroque period in musical history. Given the conventional association between the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, and relentless Protestant attacks on Catholic representational ‘idolatry’, how can the Baroque and Protestantism, and in England in particular, be associated with one another on any substantial basis? Peter D. Skrine, normally ingenious and flexible in defining the Baroque, further asserts that ‘a parliamentary system is by nature incompatible with the baroque, and doubly so in an increasingly middle-class and anti-Catholic country like England’. Yet he points out that near the end of the seventeenth century, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress uncannily shares, ‘across a gaping cultural chasm’, sentiments that create ‘a synthesis of some of the most fundamental features of the baroque’.