This book focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in one's relations with community and society. In conjunction with The Wanderer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Everyman, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost, Low considers pertinent historical beliefs, attitudes, and practices, including the experience of loneliness and exile, the development of sacramental confession from communal reconciliation to personal absolution from sin, the abolition of Purgatory and the traditional Christian solidarity with the ancestral dead, the role of conscience in the development of self, and the rise in Shakespeare and Milton of a typically modern sense of autonomous individuality and subjectivity.