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

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.

Gangraena i remedium, o herezjach i zwyrodnieniu religijnym w Anglii połowy XVII w.

Gangraena and its cure: on Heresies and Religious Perversions in mid-seventeenth century England The English Civil War saw an explosion in the production of printed material. Booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, and ballads of all types and covering all manner of subjects appeared in their thousands. Indeed, the number of titles printed during this period surpassed 2,000 per year. Among these we find a large category of prints denouncing religious heresy and perverse behaviors. The most elaborate of these was Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, which ran to several thousand pages in length and spanned three consecutive volumes. In this article, the author looks at various religious sects in England and aspects of their beliefs and behaviors to examine how the Restoration England of Charles II tried to cure its population of unorthodox and perverse religious ideas.

Thomas Southerne's Muslim Settings and the Politics of the Succession Crisis: A Critical Study of The Loyal Brother

This paper argues that Thomas Southerne used Muslim characters and settings in his play The Loyal Brother (1682) as an allegory for the Succession Crisis of the Restoration period in England. As Southerne's play was published during a time of extreme political tension and controversy, the political discourse the playwright presents in his work reflects the increasing partisanship in the English political nation. In a sense, the representations of Muslim characters in Southerne's play were heavily influenced by the contemporary politics of Restoration England. Obviously, a Tory writer like Southerne employed the image of the Muslim character to emphasize pro-Stuarts political ideas. Keywords: Thomas Southerne, The Loyal Brother, Succession Crisis, Restoration Drama

Grinling Gibbons: a Dutch master in England

Grinling Gibbons’s still-life sculpture emerged out of the artistic and proto-scientific culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands and was understood in these intellectual terms by the sophisticated, courtly consumers of his work in Restoration England. Our fondness for a myth of Gibbons as a dazzlingly skilful but intellectually vapid artist should not blind us to the intellectual focus of his sculptures. The carved frame for Elias Ashmole’s portrait in the Ashmolean collection is a sophisticated engagement with European cultures of collecting. The Cosimo panel for Charles II engages with the witty and formidably advanced scientific discourses of the Caroline court, while the limewood reredos in St James’ church, Piccadilly reaches back to the devotional roots of floral still life, reinterpreting it in the context of English Protestantism.