This chapter maps secularism as a culture, using the example of Berlin. It takes the reader through all of the venues that provided materialist monism and establishes their relationship to the socialist milieu. It begins in Free Religion, and then analyzes the city’s chief popular scientific institutions. It looks in detail at the offerings of each to illuminate how monism was communicated. This chapter argues that despite political polarization among the secularist organizations, there was nonetheless a great deal of ideological and personnel coherence across the secularist spectrum

situates Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) in the political crisis of 1618-21 to argue that its domestic discourse of legitimate rule grounded in consensual contract and liberty of conscience has political meaning. Carefully policing the boundaries between anarchic libertinism and “lawfull and Juditiall libertie,” Wroth echoes contemporary parliamentary debates about the freedom of the subject. Figuring the danger of false counsel and the threat of tyranny within both marriage and kingdom, Wroth repeatedly stages princesses liberated from threatened or real captivity to become powerful political forces in their own right. Their struggles for outward liberty are matched by struggles for freedom from inner captivity evident in female-voiced poetic complaints that move from lamenting the abandoned and betrayed Calvinist subject to seeking redress against tyranny.