Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England - Hardcover

Como, David R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804744432 ISBN 13: 9780804744430

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

This study explores the intersection of politics, religious thought, and religious culture in pre-revolutionary England, using hitherto unknown or overlooked manuscripts and printed material to reconstruct and contextualize a forgotten but highly significant antinomian religious subculture that evolved at the margins of the early seventeenth-century puritan community. By reconstructing this story, Blown by the Spirit offers a major revision of current understanding of Puritanism and the puritan community. In the process, the author illuminates the obscure and tangled question of the origins of civil-war radicalism, thereby helping to explain the course, consequences, and ultimate failure of the English revolution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David R. Como is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University.

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This study explores the intersection of politics, religious thought, and religious culture in pre-revolutionary England, using hitherto unknown or overlooked manuscripts and printed material to reconstruct and contextualize a forgotten but highly significant antinomian religious subculture that evolved at the margins of the early seventeenth-century puritan community. By reconstructing this story, Blown by the Spirit offers a major revision of current understanding of Puritanism and the puritan community. In the process, the author illuminates the obscure and tangled question of the origins of civil-war radicalism, thereby helping to explain the course, consequences, and ultimate failure of the English revolution.

Aus dem Klappentext

This study explores the intersection of politics, religious thought, and religious culture in pre-revolutionary England, using hitherto unknown or overlooked manuscripts and printed material to reconstruct and contextualize a forgotten but highly significant antinomian religious subculture that evolved at the margins of the early seventeenth-century puritan community. By reconstructing this story, Blown by the Spirit offers a major revision of current understanding of Puritanism and the puritan community. In the process, the author illuminates the obscure and tangled question of the origins of civil-war radicalism, thereby helping to explain the course, consequences, and ultimate failure of the English revolution.

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Blown by the Spirit

Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England

By David R. Como

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-4443-0

Contents

List of Abbreviations......................................................
xiii
Prologue...................................................................
1
1. Introduction............................................................
10
2. The Sinews of the Antinomian Underground................................
33
3. London's Antinomian Controversy.........................................
73
4. The Intellectual Context of Controversy: Law, Faith, and the Paradoxes 
of Puritan Pastoral Divinity...............................................
104
5. The Kingdom of Traske: The Early Career of John Traske and the Origins 
of Antinomianism...........................................................
138
6. John Eaton, the Eatonists, and the "Imputatative" Strain of English 
Antinomianism..............................................................
176
7. The Throne of Solomon: John Everarde and the "Perfectionist" Strain of 
English Antinomianism......................................................
219
8. The Grindletonians: Protestant Perfectionism in the North of England....
266
9. Two Strains Crossed: Hybrid Forms of English Antinomianism..............
325
10. Ultra-Antinomianism?...................................................
381
11. Forging Heresy: Mainstream Puritans and Laudians on Antinomianism......
392
Epilogue: 1640 and Beyond..................................................
415
Conclusion.................................................................
432
Appendixes.................................................................
A: The Influence of Familism in Seventeenth-Century England................
457
B: Familist Extracts from the Diary of Edward Howes (British Library, 
Sloane MS. 979)............................................................
469
C: Truth and Fiction in the Archives: Sources, Source-Skepticism, and the 
Sport of Heresy-Hunting....................................................
474
D: Schedule of Errors Alleged Against Roger Brearley, 1616/17..............
482
E: Letter of John Eachard, 1631............................................
486
Bibliography...............................................................
491
Index......................................................................
505

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Through the centuries, puritans have been made to wear many historicalmasks. The godly have sometimes been cast as self-righteous and hypocriticalbusybodies—intolerant, small-minded and repressive; at other points, theyhave appeared as champions of liberty, the heroic founding figures of a triumphantWhig-liberal narrative of progress and human freedom; in this century,they have not infrequently graced the scholarly stage as the insurgents of anew bourgeois order, the standard-bearers of a proto-capitalistic ethic destinedto cut the shackles of feudal bondage. In part because of this seeminglyboundless malleability, a number of modern commentators have come to regardthe admittedly amorphous categories of "puritan" and "puritanism"with a certain suspicion, some even going so far as to reject them as vague andmisleading vestiges of seventeenth-century polemical battles. Yet in spite ofsuch well-intentioned skepticism, the godly have continued to exercise a powerfulhold over scholars of early modern England, who remain plagued by anagging intuition that without "puritanism" (or some synonymous category),we cannot begin to explain the tumultuous political and cultural world of Tudor-StuartEngland.

The staying power of puritanism is in part a product of historiographicalfashion. The drive to destabilize, or even to banish, the category was pushedforward by the first wave of "revisionism" that swept through the field ofearly modern English history beginning in the late 1960s. One of the centralfeatures of the revisionist assault on Whig orthodoxy was an attempt todownplay the existence of ideological conflict in the century or so before theEnglish civil war. Where Gardiner, Notestein, Neale, and others had positedan escalating conflict over constitutional principles progressing hand-in-handwith a battle between a puritan "opposition" and an establishment Anglicanism,revisionists sought to lay down a picture of relative ideological homogeneity,stability and consensus. Crucial to this revisionist picture was the researchof Nicholas Tyacke, whose seminal work on Arminianism suggestedthat the Church of England prior to the reign of Charles I—far from representingan ideological via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—hadin fact been dominated by a strain of evangelical Calvinism, a stateof affairs that was disrupted only by the rise of an aggressive anti-Calvinistmovement in the 1620s. His work had a double effect: it simultaneously underminedthe notion of a freestanding Anglican tradition, while likewise implyingthat "puritanism," if it existed at all, was merely the most fastidious oraggressive manifestation of a broader, consensual Calvinism that was sharedby the vast majority of early Stuart churchmen. Tyacke's conclusions wererapidly assimilated into the revisionist synthesis, most notably by Conrad Russell,who used Tyacke's arguments to downplay the existence of ideologicalconflict prior to the late 1620s, when Arminianism and fiscal breakdown weretaken to have produced ruptures that had not previously existed. So, too, inthe wake of Tyacke's work, a number of scholars—including Michael Finlayson,Paul Christianson, J. C. Davis and, at certain moments, Patrick Collinson—teasedout the implications of his thesis, arguing that the category of"puritanism" was at best overused, and at worst entirely incoherent, a fictioncreated by a combination of seventeenth-century polemicists and later historians.3 In recent years, however, "puritanism" as a concept has experiencedsomething of a historiographical renaissance, owing in no small part to whatmight be termed the "second generation" of revisionist scholarship. Havingoverturned the conflictual model of the Whigs, revisionist scholars foundthemselves at length forced to provide a positive explanation for the extraordinaryevents of the mid-century, leading many of them, including KevinSharpe, John Morrill, Peter White, and even Russell himself to seize upon religion,and more specifically upon a godly or puritanical movement to reformthe church, as perhaps the central ideological precipitant of the English civilwars. In this, revisionists appear to be joining hands with their "post-revisionist"critics, most of whom have never doubted the existence of significantreligious friction in the early modern period. Thus, although large differencesremain over details of interpretation, scholars appear to be convergingupon a major...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804744432
• ISBN 13: 9780804744430
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 520
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande