In Age of Iron, Gale Carrithers and James Hardy scrutinize the habits of thought during the so-called long century of the English Renaissance, or Age of Iron, as many then termed it. Through illuminating argument, the authors reassert the essentially religious dynamism of English Renaissance culture, significantly strengthening a nascent countercurrent to recent scholarship's emphasis on secular power as the ascendant preoccupation of the era. Whereas latter-day literary and historical scholars have stressed secondary issues of political and economic power, class, gender, and race, Carrithers and Hardy underscore love - in its agapaic, philadelphic, and erotic modalities, and through the media of the tropes - love as a complement and alternative to secular power.