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David R Como - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • radical puritanism c 1558 1660
    2008
    Co-Authors: David R Como
    Abstract:

    The concept of 'radical Puritanism' was popularised in the twentieth century by scholars intent on investigating groups that earlier commentators tended to call the 'sects' or 'dissenters' of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Until then, the study of these sects remained largely the preserve of denominational chroniclers; the early historians who pioneered the scientific study of English history showed little interest in the subject. These attitudes began to shift in the twentieth century, as new generations of scholars, fascinated by the apparently transformative and democratic political forces unleashed by the English Civil Wars, reconfigured Puritanism as a radical, or even Revolutionary, ideology. In the post-war period, particular attention was often focused on the sectaries - separatists, Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchists and others - who played an indisputable role in what was increasingly described as an 'English Revolution'. Often (although not always) these sectarian forms of religion were assimilated under the rubric of 'radical Puritanism', understood as a synonym for what one historian termed 'Left-wing Puritan sects'. Given this presumed analogy between sectarianism and modern forms of left-wing political agitation, it should come as no surprise that the study of radical religion reached its apogee in the early 1970s, culminating most spectacularly in the work of the Marxist historians A. L. Morton and Christopher Hill. Morton and Hill presented the world of Civil-War sectarian Puritanism as a Revolutionary counter-culture, created by the marginal people of early modern society, and aimed at transforming the existing social order.

  • blown by the spirit puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre civil war england
    2004
    Co-Authors: David R Como
    Abstract:

    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.

Reid Barbour - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

T B L Webster - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

John Callow - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • major general thomas harrison millenarianism fifth monarchism and the English Revolution 1616 1660 by david farr farnham surrey ashgate publishing 2014 xii 304 pp 75 00 hardback isbn 978 1 4094 6554 6
    The Eighteenth Century, 2015
    Co-Authors: John Callow
    Abstract:

    Major-General Thomas Harrison. Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution, 1616-1660, by David Farr, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing, 2014, xii + 304 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4094-6554-6Having finished his business unexpectedly early, on 13 October 1660, Samuel Pepys: "went out to Charing-cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered - which was done there - he was looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition." That night, Pepys confided to his diary that: "It is said that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that have now judged him. And that his wife doth expect his coming again." 1 His, carefully encrypted, entry was intended as a private means of externalising, and of making sense of, the great public events in which he was now, increasingly, a most willing actor and recorder. Supremely reflexive, Pepys realised that he stood at a political, generational and cultural watershed, as the Republic gave way to a Restored Monarchy, as the imminent God became increasingly transcendent and as the Early Modern psyche became recognisably Modern. If George Thomason chose, after more than twenty years, to stop collecting his pamphlets at the Restoration; then, it is equally significant that Pepys started work on the most famous of his diaries at almost the same time. One language had ceased, and another had begun; at once, coarser, more pragmatic and grasping.On the one side of this divide, Samuel Pepys appears as clubbable, intellectually curious, wryly cynical and wholly materialistic; on the other, Thomas Harrison seems to be a seeker after heavenly signs and portents, an idealist enraptured by the word of God and finding his surest expression in the sounds of battle. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the youthful Pepys was disquieted by - and wholly unable to comprehend - either the Millenarian expectations of the veteran soldier or his willingness to accept a martyrdom, carefully choreographed by his enemies, in order to exact from him the maximum in terms of pain and humiliation.Briefly the second most powerful man in the land, the confidant of Cromwell, the breaker of Parliaments and the driving force behind both the Assembly of the Saints and the regicide, Thomas Harrison commands, and deserves, our attention. Yet, he is also a paradoxical, troublesome and troubling figure in the eyes of posterity, just much as he ever was for his contemporaries. He was no ascetic: his brand of Puritanism was far from dour, hallmarked by a love of display and a certain vanity - which makes him appear all the more human - and which revealed itself in his delight in fine clothes and bright colours. Sir Thomas Herbert saw him "gallantly mounted and armed; a velvet montero was on his head, a new buff coat upon his back and a crimson scarf about his waist richly fringed." 2 Lucy Hutchinson was infuriated by his upstaging of her husband, before the new Spanish ambassador, so "that he alone might appear [great] in the eies of strangers" to parliament; and Charles I found himself, for once, thoroughly out-charmed by one who "looked like a soldier and [whose] aspect was good," during his escort under guard to Windsor and London, in December 1648.3 Having risen from the ranks of the mercantile, "Middling sort"-his father had been a butcher and was elected as Mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme on no less than four occasions - Harrison had few qualms about enriching himself, through his sinecure as Lieutenant of the Ordnance, and in consolidating his social position. He kept a good stable, rented a substantial house on Highgate Hill and owned lands in Bedfordshire and Staffordshire, as well as the manor of Tottenham. Royalist critics sneered at his pursuit of ambition and luxury, while the Parliamentarian memorialist Mrs Hutchinson cattily observed that this "meane man's sonne ... of meane education, and no estate before the warre had gather 'd an estate of two thousand [pounds] a yeare . …

Foxley Rachel - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • 'Innovation' and Revolution in seventeenth-century England
    Taylor and Francis, 2020
    Co-Authors: Foxley Rachel
    Abstract:

    Historians have disputed the connotations of the term 'Revolution' in seventeenth-century England, with the aim of establishing whether contemporaries could have understood the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century as a Revolution in a sense that we recognize. However, they have largely overlooked the fact that a term existed which did often specifically denote political Revolution: 'innovation'. Innovation had this sense because it was often used as a translation for 'novae res', although it could also be used in the more familiar sense of (gradual) change. 'Innovation' was also one of the most ubiquitous pejorative terms in early Stuart political discourse, deployed by both sides in the increasingly polarized debate which led to the civil war. The fact that accusations of Revolutionary intent were so often made in this period heightens our understanding of the extent of conflict in early Stuart society, lending support to current post-revisionist interpretations. However, 'novae res', in both classical and early modern Latin texts, and 'innovation' in English, had very specific connotations. These Revolutionary 'innovations' were almost always desired rather than achieved, and the vocabulary of desire and passion which accompanies them serves to delegitimize them. They thus offered a very problematic model for potential Revolutionaries, and remained almost completely pejorative. The role of 'innovation' in the genesis of the civil war appears to be a different one: because of the semantic range of the word, it was as plausible for critics to accuse the Crown of 'innovation' (gradual change) as it was for the king and his ministers to accuse critics of desiring Revolutionary 'innovation'. This fed into the polarization of politics and the development of mirror-image views of who posed the greatest threat to the state. Through 'innovation', the Crown itself could come to be seen as dangerously Revolutionary