ABSTRACT
The Genesis literature of Traherne’s time has often been situated within literary-critical grand narratives of secularisation. In these accounts, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a transition from an Augustinian theology of original sin to a Pelagian or humanist celebration of humanity’s potential for goodness. Traherne has been located at the tipping point of this transformation: looking both back to the patristic and scholastic roots of seventeenth-century theology and forward to the development of the modern individual.
