The year 1644 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• On April 15, the second Globe Theatre is demolished by the Puritan government to make room for new housing.
• With the London theatres closed by the Puritan regime, playwriting activity shifts to closet drama. The 1644 publication of an anonymous satire against Archbishop William Laud, titled Canterbury His Change of Diet, is one mark of the shift.
• The publication of The Bloody Tenet of Persecution marks the start of a major controversy between Roger Williams and John Cotton on religious tolerance in a Calvinist context. The controversy plays out through a series of works issued by both men in the coming years, down to Williams' The Bloody Tenet Yet More Bloody (1652).

New books

• René Descartes - Principia Philosophiae
• Marin Mersenne - Cogitata physico-mathematica
• John Milton
• Areopagitica
• Of Education
• Evangelista Torricelli - Opera geometrica
• Giulio Strozzi (editor) - Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (published in Venice; a tribute to Anna Renzi, the "first diva")
• Roger Williams - The Bloody Tenet of Persecution

New drama

• Pierre Corneille - Le Menteur

Births

• August 6 - Louise de la Vallière, mistress of King Louis XIV of France, later the subject of a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père (died 1710).
• October 2 - François-Timoléon de Choisy, memoirist (died 1724)
• date unknown - Matsuo Bashō, Japanese poet (d. 1694)

Deaths

• January - William Chillingworth, controversial religious writer (born 1602)
• September 7 - Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, historian (born 1579)
• September 8 - Francis Quarles, poet (born 1592)
• November 10 - Luís Vélez de Guevara, dramatist and novelist (born 1579)