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Wiki says 'agustino' on the Spanish page which when translated by the site comes over as Augustine. From that I derived Augustinian, apologies if that is incorrect. I thought Augustan related to the emperor Augustus?

But I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition .... oops! :¬)

I shouldn't give in so easily having got so far, the entries do have a logic to them. Maybe I didn't express it clearly earlier.

For example, if you take 27 and 28 they only share 3 common letters. But you know that 28 cannot be entered inwards or outwards as in either case it wouldn't share those letters with 27. Therefore 28 must be jumbled, which in turn means that 27 and 29 cannot be. The same methodology can be employed for many of the other pairs.

I'll second that hope Dryden!

Thanks tonynannini, for your help.

The Augustan poets are Swift and Dryden and the rest of that mafia.

Still struggling with Rings 1 and 3 which I think are borderline unfair. The penultimate entry in Ring 1 is horribly ambiguous, the middle letter could be either P or U and justifiably give a thematic entry.

In fact I could use a hint to the third entry in Ring 1 (assuming I have the obscure second one correct). Is it one of the two word entries?

No need, got it now. Less obscure than the second I suppose

Thanks for adding that Foinaven, I hadn't heard that term before. Probably missed out on them as I had to study the metaphysical ones at my (approved) institution! Not sure which would have been worse, but I've never looked Donne in the eye since ...

Rest assured the reference here was definitely to Augustinian albeit in a vague way.

Finally got over the line. Far too much cold solving for me, and having to spend hours on google looking for some random and mostly unknown (to me at least) "entities" spoilt it a little. The clues are clever and fiendishly difficult, but a crossword is supposed to allow you to converge on the full grid by slowly solving the clues, not consists of 48 exam questions followed by an obscurely defined jigsaw.