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1. Radicalism and the English revolution 3. The Church of England in the eighteenth century 5. Rediscovering radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries |
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Cromohs Virtual SeminarsEvidence, Imagination and Interdisciplinarity
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1. Is the topic of radicalism and the English Revolution worthy of a 'Revival of Narrative' essay of the kind supplied by Lawrence Stone in 1979: one that attempted to address a fundamental change in how history had been written?[1] There has been no more passionate a subject among post-medieval British historians than the meaning of radicalism and hence the meaning of the English Revolution. Not unlike the faith of left-wing historians in the determinism of large-scale social and economic factors, radicalism has mattered greatly to left-leaning historians. The stakes are high. Without its existence, without the possibility of recovering it from the dust of history, contemporary 'progressive' vision loses a lot of force, and so does history constructed from a left viewpoint. Radicalism is at the apex of the left intellectual vision. Kill it and you greatly diminish left-wing intellectual heritage. The point has not been lost on British Conservative party politicians who have rejoiced in claims that the strength of radicalism in history is exaggerated, or that so-called radicalism did not in fact exist.[2] Mario Caricchio delineates a critical history of developments in the understanding of radicalism and the English Revolution since the dismantling of Marxist history by the revisionists, including the flourishing of the English Civil War and Interregnum periods as a subject of literary study. I want in this essay to sum up where current investigation of early modern radicals and radicalism has left our state of knowledge, both of the English Revolution and the historical periods that surround it. By responding to the other contributions in this virtual seminar I shall also make some further points concerning interdisciplinary work. I am grateful for the theoretical reflections offered by the other accomplished contributors: Mario Caricchio, Glenn Burgess, Ariel Hessayon, Nicholas McDowell, by the contributors to the Cromohs virtual seminar on continental responses to the English Revolution, the speakers at two recent conferences on radicalism, and by the essayists in a recent collection on English radicalism between 1550 and 1850.[3] I am not the first to point to the usefulness of Glenn Burgess' claim that context must always be invoked in order to determine what any specific kind of 'radicalism' might be. The analysis of the dynamics at Putney, and of how the officers were often more radical than the agitators, and how the two were in fact part of the same community of thought, is also valuable. This should be set within the context of the newly established view of English society not as one of opposition between the ruling few and the governed many but a very complicated network of relationships of authority and consent, of interaction at all social levels. It has been called an 'unacknowledged' republic.[4] Also helpful is the clarification of how we might think of the relationship between chronologically successive radical movements. We should no longer think of a coherent and connected 'tradition' but of a succession of events, each perhaps symptomatic of common causes within a particular historical period.[5] One significant element that distinguishes my understanding from Mario Caricchio's and Jonathan Scott's is that the abolition of monarchy and House of Lords in 1649 does seem to me to constitute a political revolution. Many radicals were involved in the Civil War and the making of that political revolution, more were produced by it, but radicalism itself was not the revolution. I also dissent from the insistence that a concept cannot be discussed in history if the name we give it in our present did not then exist (and 'radicalism' was an early nineteenth-century coining). Nicholas McDowell gives a good answer to this position, so I shall not touch it myself. 2. Revisionism, the movement that challenged the Marxists, wants to show that nothing is new: it simply wants to assert that change happens and there are no necessary long-term underlying causes. It dismisses teleological history (Whig or Marxist) but then finds it hard to put an alternative in its place. In the search for a new telos, what part do literary approaches have to play? Past and Present's counterpart, perhaps with more of a genuflection toward the New Left Movement of the 1960s, is the History Workshop Journal, which has not shied away from using literary evidence and many other kinds of source, especially with a commitment to the testimony of the memory of important historical events. True enough, it is only very recently that there have been articles on early modern matters using literary evidence. Nonetheless, HWJ has a lead here in respect of 'popular' literature as opposed to the high literary canon.[6] Literary approaches also help us to understand the transmission of radical material, even if it was no longer a tradition. As both Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas McDowell show, new research on the historical sources of radicalism enables us to see how many areas of investigation (book collecting or reading, for instance) enabled a consciousness among eighteenth and nineteenth-century radicals of sixteenth and seventeenth-century figures and texts. This is new material and it addresses the problem of a radical tradition. It seems to me that new materials, from libraries and archives, is crucial in advancing our knowledge of radicalism, and that it makes little showing in the most theoretical piece in this seminar, that of Glenn Burgess. To this extent there must surely be strong objection to Burgess' claim that surviving material is not part of 'real history' but only contributes to the making of historical myth, to say nothing of publications that explain as real history this very phenomenon.[7] Furthermore Burgess refers to no new material whatsoever, or to the significance itself of discovering hitherto unnoticed or overlooked material. By contrast it was the overlooked or forgotten with which the left wing historians of the mid-20th-century were engaging. We might also say that this theme of retrieving the forgotten, strong also with feminists, chimes with an early modern oppositional and radical concern: the need to keep records of history in the making (such as debates in Parliament) lest tyrannical rulers deprive their subjects of the ability to understand their predicament. It is a notable confession from one of the most influential historians of the radicals that the brief summaries of Winstanley's 1648 tracts in the most readily available editions has led to a substantial misunderstanding of his position on popular allegiance and obligation during the Second Civil War.[8] In the more extensive and abstracted versions of his arguments Burgess's formulations produce in the reader's mind counter-examples that disprove his point. The argument looks brittle since it does not address every piece of evidence necessary to its case. It is certainly logical, but in one important sense, the arena of information retrieval from libraries and archives, it is not as scholarly as we might wish and another kind of approach is needed. A further problem with the 'categorical imperative' is that there are silent implications in the very nature of the argument. For instance in Burgess's claims for the success and influence of J.C. Davis's arguments that the Ranters were merely the creation of a hostile press when in fact Davis, despite the persuasiveness of his work, has been effectively challenged, not least in his near-exclusive focus on printed as opposed to archival and manuscript sources.[9] One of the dangers with such concision is that crucial secondary material might also go unmentioned. 3. Whatever else might be said of them, the Communist Party Historians Group researched and wrote with imagination: they each went into uncharted evidential territory. To that extent the power of the historian's imagination is an overlooked aspect of their achievement. Although Mario Caricchio speaks of imagination in a slightly different sense, as a component in the historical explanation of the English Revolution (in the sense that the revolution failed, but English literature was nonetheless greatly enriched), I hope we could agree that all historians need good imaginations. It is precisely the power of historical imagination to seek out new materials as well as new explanations beyond the horizon of extant historiographical imagination that matters. In this respect, those who ignore interdisciplinary work, should they wish to appreciate the full range of innovative work in the field, do so at their peril.[10] Much new insight into the English Revolution has been provided by literary scholars, or by historians using literary methodology, or indeed by historians using anthropological methods appropriate to local history, much as in the 1960s sociological method was readily employed by historians.[11] It is certainly a two-way street: literary scholars have a lot to learn from the historians who have discerned the operation of a 'republic' within the kingdom before 1640, a 'commonwealth' tradition in social behavior and constitutional awareness that to say the least complicates the focus on monarchy in most of the scholarship on English Renaissance drama.[12] Yet it is in a considerable way through using the work of literary scholars that Luc Borot has been able to develop his recent penetrating discussion of the Leveller Richard Overton's politics.[13] There is no evidence of these more recent fields disappearing: instead there has been an encouragingly steady growth of scholarship. Historians who think largely within their discipline are necessarily less open both to the findings of extra- or interdisciplinary work, and to the stimulus of inter-disciplinary thought. Literary critics and historians may not see entirely eye to eye, at least from the viewpoints that pertain at the centre of each discipline's territory, but there is a valuable interaction of disciplinary insights produced when methodological agendas meet. It may seem that the history of political thought fits much more easily with history than literary history, but in fact the three fields have productively interrelated for some time now.[14] Across and between them comes the field of the history of the book. In this respect, the focus on the uses made of different kinds of literature in heterodox movements is a significant and still understudied area. Recent work on the apparent uses of poetry in the Grindletonian movement presents an interesting example of a kind of text functioning in addition to preached sermons, and as an aid to worship and meditation.[15] This affirms the medium of language as a key issue in the practice of heterodox religion and how it related to or differentiated itself from orthodoxy.[16] This is no less valuable than the very timely close analysis of the contents of Leveller tracts which begins to rewrite our understanding of Leveller ideas and ideology.[17] 4. A new text can make a big difference to a field. Joseph Salmon's Divinity Anatomized is a long lost text recently recovered. In 1986, J.C. Davis regarded this tract as the first piece of evidence in the case for identifying Salmon as a Ranter; a tract he claimed then was 'no longer extant.'[18] A copy was acquired by the Clark Library, and noticed first by Mario Caricchio in his Politica, religione e commercio di libri nella Rivoluzione inglese. Gli autori di Giles Calvert (Genova, 2003), his study of print culture during the English Revolution. It had appeared in several library catalogues, but no copy had been traceable. The tract is crucial because it is the only evidence we have of a printed statement by Salmon during the period when the Ranters were active from 1649. To judge from his own later confession, it was work containing some extreme heretical views and it landed him in trouble. The preface to the tract offers an account of a revelation from God that was as difficult to access as it was for Salmon to express it. It is typical Salmon, written in hyperbolic terms that suggest some literary training or, more probably, a good ear for imitating a Puritan divine who had been touched by Platonism - in fact like William Erbury and William Sedgwick. It acknowledges that the contents might be labeled blasphemy and heresy, and that just writing down that lending of 'light and truth' will risk converting 'apprehension' into 'notion' so that authenticity as well as immediacy will be lost. The heresy comes hard on the preface: Christ, maintains Salmon, is an infinite, invisible God and lives inside human flesh - us. It offers nonetheless a Trinitarian theology but one driven into a heresy of spiritism. This is the classic Ranter doctrine: we, human flesh, are God by virtue of Christ's incarnation. The second major point is that God appeared to man not as God in himself but in a fleshly form. In a passage where Christ temporarily disappears, God appears to be interacting with man, and restoring to him unfallen fleshly experience; perhaps indeed this is a reference to sex in the name of the spirit; free love. A purging then takes place in the individual consequent upon this meeting of God and man in which all that is not God is cast out. Salmon renders this in terms of feminine biblical imagery - the bondwoman cast out by the freeborn woman (a text also used by Coppe), and also by imagery that Salmon's contemporaries (most notoriously John Milton in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643)) took to be sexual - the purgation is a 'grinding in one Mill.' The further references to fire here, and God's presence as a consuming fire, are significant, perhaps describing the intense psychosomatic experience the Ranters claimed to have, perhaps too linking to the fiery consummation promised to those who loved purely in the flesh and not in the spirit (such as, for instance courtly women).[19] In all of this Salmon has offered a descriptive structure of transformation, as if it were a formal pious or mystical treatise.[20] If all this is true, we will have a very important piece of new evidence for the history of the Ranters. 5. The methodologies associated with the history of the book have played a major role to play as the idea of a 'public sphere' in the 1640s had been tested. New pamphlets have been uncovered, or had notice brought to them, in hitherto unnoticed library catalogues: for instance the library catalogue of the Independent lawyer Samuel Jeake of Rye and his son Samuel the astrologer.[21] This is also true of Jason McElligott's use of William Hone's papers in Washington State University Library, of Ariel Hessayon's work already noted, instanced in his Cromohs essay, on collectors of radical books, and of Maureen Bell's work on eighteenth-century working-class readers.[22] I would also note the analysis of printed pages and devices and hitherto unseen manuscripts in order to present more refined arguments with regard to the authorship and operation of printed media in heretical and Leveller print campaigns of the mid-1640s.[23] It is not merely that pamphlets were printed and statements in favour of radical reform made, or even that other people noticed that statements were made. This new work raises questions about how pamphlets were printed; David Como suggests that print workers more radical than their press owners by whom they were employed used the presses of their masters to produce religious and politically opposite statements. This history of 'radical politics' in the English revolution thus becomes one where the exploitation of technology crucial for the spread of information becomes a key issue with the early modern and specifically London public sphere. Add to this Jason Peacey's accounts of tract sponsorship during the 1640s (including the late 1640s when the royalists might be seen as 'radicals') and Kate Peters' meticulous history of the exploitation of the press by Quakers and we begin to have a distinctive new history.[24] As we saw earlier, Como's work discovered the distinctive use of poetry in a north country heresy, the Grindletonians. But there are other uses of poetry to be found in non-enthusiastic circles. Poetry had a memorial function here as much as a devotional one, rather like an epic for a sect. We should further remember that the first English Socinian, Paul Best, was a poet and seems to have made or set out some of his discoveries in his poetry.[25] There is further scope here for work on visuality in radical writing, an almost unexplored aspect of radicalism in any general sense. Ariel Hessayon's consideration of the bizarre woodcuts in Thomas Tany's work would be an exception here, and this includes some knowledge of tracts posted on walls: the printed graffiti of the English Revolution.[26] This material also connects with sexuality as articulated in lay literature from which the church is not excluded: we can go to the middle ages to see this articulated, for instance in Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale' and the witty burying of theology in sexuality and physiology. I think Coppe in his way is doing the same thing. James Grantham Turner thinks that Ranters are in this sense part of a truly libertine culture; certainly this is an area of the history of sexuality that needs more attention.[27] Visuality and sexuality (and for that matter the phenomenon of the gaze) connect with the way in which radicals appeared, making themselves look different to their contemporaries, or exploiting aspects of physical appearance, such as aging.[28] 6. Print culture and its relationship with manuscript culture (in this case, correspondence) has been placed by Ann Hughes at the heart of Puritan politics during the 1640s.[29] The contention of different confessions and congregations is part of the social history of speech acts, and the coming into authorship of hitherto excluded sections of the population. This is also part of the history of class or social strata interaction.[30] In no sense does religion replace or annihilate social difference, or any other aspect of human activity (such as medicine). Neither did those who eschewed conventional constitutional politics in the name of religion lack a 'politics' insofar as religious communities beyond the established church in early modern England were fellowships who made decisions among themselves and related to people and institutions around them.[31] It is our job to see how religious configurations in the past mediated categories we would understand as in different or self-standing categories today. Petitions and their politics aside, how do we measure a 'revolution' or redistribution of speech against other social phenomena, such as a measurable redistribution of landowning? The investigation of 'dangerous talk' falls into this category.[32] And how does that relate to the ownership and exploitation of the means of production? What emerges is another version of the 'unacknowledged republic' but this time with the spotlight on the interactions understood as different kinds of communication . Such a perspective ties together the diachronic work of Andy Wood concerned with eighteenth-century miners apparently using Leveller ideas to defend themselves, and Rachel Foxley's painstaking analysis of the contents of Leveller tracts.[33] Both approaches are in part a long history of the common law and church courts at work. We should add too the ways in which civic identity, citizenship within the law, was known and debated by radicals and different kinds of authorities. Luc Borot's analysis of the variety of Leveller speech acts and actions is particularly valuable in this respect, and the different proverbial and biblical make-up of Richard Overton's pamphlets, is particularly noteworthy.[34] Just as important is the ongoing detailed account of republican writing, especially during the 1650s.[35] Here too for future consideration are the perceptions of what was imagined to have been lost by restructuring the polity.[36] It is clearly important to have a better knowledge of the ideas and perceptions that have been suppressed through the ideological preferences generated in the course of history: Catholicism of course, but also the Irish dimension, the Caribbean and the New England ones.[37] In all of this, we must not neglect the old theme of poverty, how it arises and how it is to be treated. 7. Print culture was also an important feature in the activities of surviving radicals during the Restoration and afterwards. Martin Dzelzainis has been extremely successful in uncovering the operation of the Calvert presses so that printed copies of the chief attack on Clarendon's ministry, the advice-to-a-painter poems could be maximally circulated. Significantly, we find here the operation of double agents (in particular with regard to the career of the Baptist printer George Larkin), as the government censors interfered with the printing community, and as profit became as significant a motivation as ideology.[38] Yet such printers, even if double agents for the government, still thought of themselves as true to their particular dissenting cause. At the same time, the involvement of the 'middling sort' in corporation politics, and in making corporation politics address national issues, is demonstrably a repetition in the Restoration of Leveller ideas and strategies, this time bound to the dominant concerns with Popery and arbitrary government. In the case of the linen-draper Francis Jencks, who was instrumental in opposition and early Whig politics in the late 1670s and the early 1680s, this was knowingly so. Connected by friendship and by marriage with key Levellers from the 1640s and 1650s, he understood his actions in the context of the earlier movement.[39] The Shaftesburian opposition may be understood in this sense to have confronted and to some extent incorporated Leveller and republican ideals, albeit fragmentarily and over a long period of time.[40] Also there is women's writing seen as a kind of resistance to the predicament of gender disempowerment.[41] Some women's writing, notably poetry in manuscript, is extraordinarily different from its counterpart discourses found in print by women or by men in manuscript and print.[42] This even extends to the matter of political theory, notably in respect of contract.[43] What we have is the beginning of so many micro-histories all progressively adding up to one substantial, highly-grained narrative of the early modern political sphere, with a starting point often in the matter of print, the key technology in the manipulation of early modern politics. It was where motivation to action began.[44] But the printed book need not be the end as well as the beginning. Manfred Brod's painstaking contextualizing of mystical radical religion in the Thames Valley, focused on the Seekers, and the figure of John Pordage, is a very fine example of a local prosopography study. It uses print culture, and could not avoid it, but also has much more besides for us to consider.[45] 8. To this picture must be added an accurate and extensive account of the European dimensions of radicalism and heterodoxy: the history of heresy and political sedition in early modern Europe and how it relates to English models. This would include movements that had an influence in England (Anabaptism, Socinianism, anti-trinitarianism in Hungary as well as Poland, perhaps even more exotic figures like the Jewish 'fundamentalist' Uriel D'Acosta) as well as the operation of English radicals abroad, and the wider digestion of events in England by continental culture.[46] We need this broader picture also for comparative insight into print culture (not least in respect of punitive practices such as book burning). This would include a philosophical framework for both religious and political ideas.[47] I applaud recent essays by Stefano Villani and Pietro Messina while calling for further investigation of the impact of regicide in Europe.[48] The presence of exiles is now a well-explored subject,[49] but the further cultural history of the reception of events like the regicide in English history remains to be written. The regicide, as is well known, was widely reviled. For instance, England lost her trading privileges with Russia as a consequence. Andreas Gryphius' play Ermordete Majestat, oder Carolus Stuardus was widely performed, is a totally different kind of play to anything in the English canon and is an important guide to the relationship between the English regicide and the rise of European absolutism. It is directly the product of contact between a German intellectual and the English and Scottish exiles he met, including Henrietta Maria, and involves an entirely novel presentation of radical Puritans, people who were real players in events, to a greater or lesser extent, transformed into notable characters in Gryphius's play.[50] We can all be grateful to Jonathan Israel for his insistence of Spinoza and his Dutch followers as originators of the 'radical enlightenment.' I hope now we can look more carefully at the connections between English and Dutch thinkers.[51] 9. Part of the rich mixture of enthusiasm and the occult that is part of the European context also involves the emergence of free-thinking. The importance of constructing and understanding heterodox cosmologies and bodies of knowledge in general, both in their contents and in context in which that content was understood cannot be underestimated.[52] We have been enlightened by Joad Raymond and Ariel Hessayon's work on angels. It has always been important to see Jacob Boehme's texts in this context, perhaps the most important of the occult texts, although Cornelius Agrippa might be seen now to be challenging him.[53] Equally important is seeing this knowledge through time in different contexts.[54] One spectacularly important recent development here is the history of vegetarianism elaborated by Tristram Stuart, ranging from the interests of eccentric intellectuals to theologians, and from self-appointed vegetarian prophets like Roger Crab and Thomas Tryon to key western philosophers such as David Hume.[55] Early modern vegetarianism was both a confession of some radicals (and others) and eventually a fashion and part of the early critique of empire. Increasingly the vegetarians venerated what they took to be the vegetarian diet of the Indian Brahmins, but it was only possible in the circumstances to make that knowledge known through forgery of allegedly 'Brahmin' writing. Not only does Sarah Apetrai's work resituate late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women's writing in a theological context, and shows how central theology was to it, she also argues that a 'turn to mystical theology in late seventeenth-century England profoundly influenced conceptions about the nature of women.'[56] 10. In much that we might define as 'radical', a transformation in linguistic usages by people we might label 'radicals' can be observed across time in the past. This must not be seen as a transformation of language in and of itself (as Glenn Burgess says, there is no such thing as inherently radical language), but a matter of new potentials being seen in the interpretation of sacred or legal texts. It is not a monolithic 'radical tradition' to be sure but it does make for a series of connections through time of in which the transmission of ideas can be materially measured, perhaps through the medium of written or printed materials, perhaps through a church or a civic association. Sometimes there is discontinuity. The major lesson I would want to leave is that scholarship does not end with categorization, but with thinking of as many new ways as possible to discover the past, and of solving the problems of reaching new awareness through new approaches to evidence, be this reinterpretation of what we have, or finding entirely new evidence. The English Revolution should always be coming back to us in new ways. [1] Lawrence Stone, 'The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History', P & P, 85 (1979), 3-24. [2] The alleged response of Kenneth Baker, then Minister of State for Education in Margaret Thatcher's government , to J.C. Davis's Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). [3] Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism 1550-1850 (Cambridge, 2007), 1-16. [4] Mark Goldie, 'The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England', in Tim Harris. ed., The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500-1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 153-94. See also S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England 1550-1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); M. Braddick, State Formation in Early modern England, c. 1500-1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven and London, 2000). [5] See also Glenn Burgess, 'Introduction' in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 1-16. [6] See, e.g., Blair Worden 'The Politics of Marvell's Horatian Ode', HJ, 27 (1984), 525-54; id., 'Historians and Poets', HLQ, 68, (2005), 71-93. [7] Burgess, 'Introduction', 10; 'Introduction', in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, eds., British Literary Radicalism, 1650-1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge, 2002). [8] J.C. Davis, 'Reassessing Radicalism in a Traditional Society', in Burgess and Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 359. [9] Burgess, 'Introduction', 7-8; J.F. McGregor, et al., 'Debate: Fear, Myth and Furore, Reappraising the Ranters, P & P, 140 (1993), 155-210. [10] Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing's introduction to their symposium of articles entitled 'Rethinking the English Revolution', HWJ, 61 (2006), 153-5. Burgess and Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 'Introduction', ignore work not in history or political thought. [11] The field is considerable, but see for example David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge, 1999); Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (Cambridge, 2003); Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996); John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007). [12] Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); Goldie, 'The Unknowledged Republic.' [13] Borot, 'Richard Overton and Radicalism: the New Interest of the Civic Ethos in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England', in Burgess and Festenstein, English Radicalism, 37-61. [14] See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996); idem, 'Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence', EIC, XLIV (1994), 267-292. [15] David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, 2004); Nigel Smith, 'Elegy for a Grindletonian: Poetry and Heresy in Northern England, 1615-1640', JMEMS, 33 (2003), 335-51. [16] Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (Oxford, 2003); Ethan Shagan, 'Why did the Poet Cross the Via Media? The strange career of Henoch Clapham', delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland c.1550-c.1700: Movements of People, Texts and Ideas', Goldsmith's College, University of London, 21-23 June, 2006, <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/radicalism>. [17] See below, n. 34. [18] J.C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 31. [19] See [Abiezer Coppe], Divine Fire-Works (1657), in Abiezer Coppe, Selected Writings, ed. Andrew Hopton (London, 1987), 98-105. [20] To date this is all I can say on Salmon's pamphlet since I was sent the first twenty pages in a digital scan (about one quarter of the entire work) before refurbishment temporarily closed the Clark Library. [21] Michael Hunter et al., eds., A Radical's Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye (Woodbridge, 1999). [22] Jason McElligott, 'William Hone and the transmission of radical ideas', delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism', <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/radicalism>; Maureen Bell of the University of Birmingham has forthcoming work on the 17th-century contents of the 1722 library catalogue of Titus Wheatcroft of Ashover, Derbyshire. [23] David Como, 'Heresy Incarnate: The publication of Mans Mortalitie', David Adams, 'A radical diaspora? The propagation of Leveller political thought', both delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism.' [24] Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004); Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005). [25] Nigel Smith, '"And if God was one of us": Paul Best, John Biddle and anti-Trinitarian heresy in seventeenth-century England', in David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160-84. [26] Ariel Hessayon, Gold tried in the Fire: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1989), 283-4. [27] James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002), 48 et seq.. [28] See Naomi Baker, 'Broken-hearted Mothers: Gender and Community in Joan Whitrow, et al., 'The Work of God in a Dying Maid (1677)', Quaker Studies, 7:2 (2003), 128-144. [29] Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). [30] See Burgess, 'Radicalism and the English Revolution', in Burgess and Festenstein, eds., English Radicalism, 64-5, and for a contrary view, see James Holstun, 'Ranting at the New Historicism', ELR, 19 (1989), 189-225. [31] Burgess, 'Radicalism and the English Revolution', 78-80. [32] Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London (London, 1997); David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford, 2006). [33] Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999); Rachel Foxley, 'John Lilburne and the Citizenship of "free-born Englishmen"', HJ, 47 (2004), 849-874. [34] Luc Borot, 'Richard Overton and Radicalism'; Nicholas McDowell, 'Levelling Language: the Politics of Literacy in the English Radical Tradition', Critical Quarterly, 46 (2004), 39-62; idem, 'The Ghost in the Marble: Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying (1647) and its Readers', in Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene, eds., Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2006). [35] See Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), Pts. I and II; 252-93. [36] An important theme in the papers of J.C. Davis, Glenn Burgess, Philip Baker and Jared van Duinen at 'Rediscovering Radicalism', <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/radicalism>. [37] See Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002); Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, Belgium, 2004); Ethan Shagan, ed., Catholics and the Protestant Nation (Manchester, 2005); Peter Davidson, The Universal Baroque (Manchester, 2007). [38] Martin Dzelzainis, 'George Larkin and the London literary underground 1666-1690', 'This Persecuted Means": Radicalism and the Book, 1600-1870', Center for the Study of Books and Media Conference, Princeton University, March 2006. See also Martin Dzelzainis, 'Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems', in Gilles Sambras, ed., New Perspectives on Andrew Marvell (Rheims, 2007), 139-56. John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: religion and intellectual change in seventeenth-century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006); see also papers by Sandra Hynes and David Manning, delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism', <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/radicalism>. [39] See the entry on Jencks by Gary de Krey in ODNB. [40] Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986). [41] Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth-Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2002); Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2006). [42] See Hester Pulter, ''Poems breathed forth by the nobel Hadassas, and The Unfortunate Florinda, by Lady Hesther Pulter' [c. 1645-1655]', University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS Lt q 32. [43] Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton, 2004), ch. 7; Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 181-233, 313-59; on a related issue, see Mary Pope, A treatise of magistracy, shewing, the magistrate hath beene, and for ever is to be the cheife [sic] officer in the Church, out of the Church, and over the Church; and that the two Testaments hold forth. (1647), 4. [44] M.J. Braddick, 'Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s', forthcoming. [45] Manfred Brod, 'A Radical Network in the English Revolution: John Pordage and His Circle, 1646- 54', EHR, 119 (2004), 1230-1253; see also Andrew Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999 (London, 2000), esp. pp. 19-46. Another important contribution is the description of the revolutionary public spheres in James Holstun, Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York, 2000). [46] Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, eds. Socinianism and Arminianism. Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden and Boston, 2005). Justin Champion, 'Between, belief, authority and practice: radicalism and revolution 1649-1789' in N. Smith and T. Morton, eds., Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650-1830 (Cambridge, 2001), 29-44, 220-226. On D'Acosta, see Miriam Bodian, 'In the Cross-Currents of the Reformation: Crypto-Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition 1570-1670', P&P, 177 (2002), 66-104. [47] Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht, 2004); idem, Apokalypse und Philologie: Wissensgeschichten und Weltentwürfe der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2007). [48] Stefano Villani, 'English radicalism and 17th century Italian movements', delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism'; Pietro Messina, 'The Italian libertine historians and the English Revolution', in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-3 <www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/messina.html>. [49] Geoffrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640-1660 (Houndmills and New York, 2003); conference on 'Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640-1685', Institute of English Studies, University of London, 28-9 July, 2006, http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2006/Exile/Index.html [50] R.J. Alexander, 'A Possible Historical Source for the Figure of Poleh in Andreas Gryphius' Carolus Stuardus', Daphnis, 3.2 (1974), 203-7. Hoyle appears misspelt as 'Hople' in Johann Georg Schleder's Theatrum Europaeum (1663), 1124, thereby supplying Gryphius with the beginnings of an anagram. [51] There is still room for exploration here, building on Jonathan Israel's, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006). [52] Hessayon, Gold Tried in the Fire; William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005); Joad Raymond, 'Angels and Radical speculation in the 1640s and 1650s', delivered at 'Rediscovering Radicalism', <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/radicalism>. [53] B.J. Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England (Cambridge, 1996); Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York and London, 2007), 74-5. [54] See 'Introduction' in Morton and Smith, eds., Radicalism in British Literary Culture. [55] Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution. [56] Sarah Apetrai, ''Female Advocates': Gender and Theology in Women's Writing, 1680-1710' (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2006).
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