scholarly journals The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Andrew Crome
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Shared Memory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
German City ◽  
Controversial Literature ◽  
Restoration England

Abstract This article examines the ways in which the violent Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1533–5 was reinterpreted in Restoration England. Historians have often recognized that the incident was used to attack English Baptists in the seventeenth century, but there has been little systematic exploration of the processes behind this. This article suggests that recollections of Münster in later seventeenth-century England were a species of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – an internationally shared memory of trauma put to distinctive local uses. References to Münster served as ways for English writers to tie nonconformists to specific acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Thomas Venner's 1661 rising in London, without directly recalling these events. Historical discussions of the Münster rising therefore often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists. Condemnations of the violence in the German city were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist writers responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster rising. This article demonstrates these points through a range of sources, including sermons, letters, commentaries, controversial literature, and almanacs.

Dryden and Enthusiasm

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John West
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
The Stability

For John Dryden, enthusiasm was a crucial form of literary authority. It allowed writers to speak of supernatural or divine things. It signalled the intense emotions of an audience or reader that allowed them to share the writer’s visionary transport. Enthusiasm also carried disturbing political and religious registers. Referring to mistaken claims of divine inspiration, it was associated with the religious sects of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. In Dryden’s work, it characterizes religious dissenters whom he regarded as inheritors to the ideas of those mid-century radicals. For Dryden, enthusiasm was at a literary ideal and a threat to the stability of the state. Dryden and Enthusiasm is the first book-length account of the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in the work of one of the major writers of the seventeenth century. It charts the interaction of the different manifestations of enthusiasm throughout Dryden’s literary criticism, poetry, and drama, and against the changing religious and political contexts of Restoration England. Countering a view of Dryden as a poet of order and reason, the book argues that he was an enthusiastic writer who believed that imaginative literature could break into unearthly realms. Examining the surprising proximity of Dryden’s rhetoric of enthusiasm to that which he denigrated in his religious and political opponents, the book reimagines the interaction of literary practice and ideological allegiance in the aftermath of the Civil Wars.

‘A Welsh Lancashire’? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Jesuit Mission ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Popish Plot

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

From Seeker to Finder: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Spiritualism Before The Quakers

1948 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Arthur Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
British History ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
The Trinity

The period of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth in England was one of the most momentous epochs in British history. For small groups of people the decade of the 1640's inaugurated a New Age—an age in which the Holy Spirit reigned triumphant. Such believers reached the zenith of Puritan “spiritualism,” or that movement which placed the greatest emphasis upon the Third Person of the Trinity.

POLITICAL INFORMATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-565
Author(s):  
KATE LOVEMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Face ◽  
King Of France

Reading, society and politics in early modern England. Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix+363. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. £50.00.The politics of information in early modern Europe. Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viii+310. ISBN 0-415-20310-4. £75.00.Literature, satire and the early Stuart state. By Andrew McRae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+250. ISBN 0-521-81495-2. £45.00.The writing of royalism, 1628–1660. By Robert Wilcher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+403. ISBN 0-521-66183-8. £45.00.Politicians and pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum. By Jason Peacey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xi+417. ISBN 0-7546-0684-8. £59.95.The ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration publicist. By Lois G. Schwoerer. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii+349. ISBN 0-8018-6727-4. £32.00.In 1681 the Italian newswriter Giacomo Torri incurred the wrath of the French ambassador to the Venetian Republic with his anti-French reporting. The ambassador ordered Torri to ‘cease and desist or be thrown into the canal’. Torri, who was in the pay of the Holy Roman Emperor, responded to the ambassador's threat with a report that ‘the king of France had fallen from his horse, and that this was a judgement of God’. Three of the ambassadors' men were then found attacking Torri ‘by someone who commanded them to stop in the name of the Most Excellent Heads of the Council of Ten … but they replied with certain vulgarities, saying they knew neither heads nor councils’. Discussed by Mario Infelise in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron's collection, this was a very minor feud in the seventeenth-century battles over political information, but it exemplifies several of the recurring themes of the books reviewed here. First, the growing recognition by political authorities across Europe that news was a commodity worthy of investment. Secondly, the variety of official and unofficial sanctions applied in an attempt to control the market for news publications. Thirdly, the recalcitrance of writers and publishers in the face of these sanctions: whether motivated by payment or principle, disseminators of political information showed great resourcefulness in frustrating attempts to limit their activities. These six books investigate aspects of seventeenth-century news and politics or, alternatively, seventeenth-century literature and politics – the distinction between ‘news’ and certain literary genres being, as several of these authors show, often difficult to make.

Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
English History ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Social ◽  
Civil War Soldiers ◽  
Parish Registers

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

Henry Care, Roger L’ Estrange and the Contested Memory of Erasmus and the Reformation in Restoration England

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Public ◽  
William Penn ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English Society ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Henry Care and Roger L’ Estrange fought a bitter battle in the public press in Restoration England. Exploring the ways in which each employed the writings and reputation of Desiderius Erasmus provides insight into the deep fault lines dividing English society in the decade from 1678 to 1688. Their divergent uses of Erasmus demonstrate how late-seventeenth-century interpretations of the early sixteenth-century Reformation became critical points of conflict in the most significant political and religious debates of the period. Paying attention to the reception of Erasmus also helps explain how these two bitter enemies eventually joined William Penn in supporting James II’s Indulgence for Liberty of Conscience.

George Fox, Millenarian

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Larry Ingle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Small Step ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Widespread Interest

“Friends, take heed of setting up that which God will throw down, lest you be found fighters against God.”The nearly two decades comprising the period of the English Revolution were marked by a widespread interest in the timely appearance of the millennium, the thousand year period of Christ's promised earthly reign. From scholarly biblical studies of Daniel and Revelation to omens such as total eclipses of the sun and rumors of a Nottingham girl returning from the dead to warn a sinful world of approaching destruction, people in revolutionary England were bombarded with “evidence” of divine intervention and the expected arrival of the new kingdom. Parliament's victory in the English civil wars and its execution of Charles I in 1649 dramatically blew away the aura of divinity surrounding the monarchy and promised a new and glorious age. As they read prophecies in Revelation about a New Jerusalem where God would dry all tears and banish death, sorrow, and pain, enthusiasts of the seventeenth century anxiously looked for the Christ who promised, “Behold, I come quickly.” So prevalent were such notions that, as one authority has stressed, popular millenarianism seemed only a small step beyond received orthodoxy.

‘The More Posed and Wise Advice’: The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the English Civil Wars

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Over Time

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald'sClarendonbrilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Winship
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Government

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

scholarly journals Catholic Political Thought and Calvinist Ecclesiology in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Karie Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Human Liberty ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government

Abstract This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

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