Patrick Collinson has argued that during the difficult decade of the 1590s ‘there was a profound alteration in religious culture, amounting to the full internalization of the theology of John Calvin … Religion was an act of continual and deliberate submission to the divine will and purpose’. Whether or not it is possible to identify the processes of cultural internalisation as confidently as Collinson does, it is certainly the case, as we have seen in the previous chapter, that Calvinist divines such as William Perkins or Arthur Dent charted the movements of this cultural internalisation, providing for the godly (or the would-be godly), a nascent Protestant psychological schema. In this chapter, I want to pursue these concerns further in order to argue, as I put it in the previous chapter, that both language and sense perception resolutely fail to offer the Protestant subject emotional or epistemological certitude, and that this opens up the space of fantasy.

As a way into this, perhaps it might first be useful to say a little more about how this psychological schema operated and how it was coloured by these Protestant concerns. First, although the soul was of primary import, a perception or cogitation was believed to originate in the heart, the centre of being in this predominantly Aristotelian model of the body. Often the cogitation emanated at the behest of the brain.