J. Eales

The culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700

The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700. Edited by Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales. Themes in Focus. New York: St. Martins Press, 1996. viii + 332 pp.

A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642

45.00 (cloth). Patrick Collinson is the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and a leading scholar of English Puritanism. His name does not appear on the cover of this work, but his influence is evident throughout. He contributed the first essay and is often cited bv the other contributors to this collection. Peter Lake even converts Collisons name to an adjectival form. For Lake a Collinsonian depiction of Puritanism is of a form of voluntary religion and ethical rigorism operating on the personal and interpersonal, the domestic and household levels, to supplement and extend . . . the norms and forms of the national church and the wider society (p. 156). As that definition might suggest, the chapters of this collection attempt to define and describe Puritanism in social rather than theological terms. In their introduction, editors Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales explain why a social approach is preferable to the theological one taken by such authors as J. F. H. New, J. Sears McGee, Richard Greaves, and Peter White. Durston and Eales argue that theological markers, such as the doctrine of double predestination, are not useful before the mid-1620s because a wide spectrum of Anglicans subscribed to them. It was only when a royal party succeeded in convincing many Anglicans to adopt a high-church Arminian theology that a Reformed theology could be said to be typical of a Puritan remnant. Eales and Durston adopt, therefore, an alternative cultural approach, which they see as consistent with the work of Peter Burke in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. They apply this approach to Puritanism by identify ing the movement as grounded in a highly distinctive cast of mind-or to use a more fashionable term, mentalite (p. 9). In the subsequent chapters, the contributors to this collection describe this mentalite in a variety of ways. Two of the chapters are rather broad in scope. Patrick Collinsons chapter touches upon Puritan opposition to popular festivals, games, and the theater, and their alternative activities of listening to sermons, psalm-singing, and participation in public fasts. Jacqueline Eales describes the network of educational institutions, printed works, political connections, and individual families with with which Puritans kept alive and expanded their movement during the later Elizabethan and early Stuart years. Other chapters are more specific in their focus. Peter Lake examines literature of the mutual denunciations by Puritans and their opponents and concludes that the identities of the two groups were dialectically linked. (p. 165) That is to say; the members of each group made use of the other to distance themselves from unwanted logical consequences of the positions that they held. Ralph Houlbrooke traces the contours of the Puritan ars moriendi, which involved neither Holy Communion nor a full confession to a priest, but did place a premium on submission to Gods will. …

Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–1643)

The royalist cleric Peter Heylyn in his Aerius Redivivus of 1670 described English presbyterianism, which he also termed puritanism, as part of an international Calvinist faction dedicated to raising rebellions against monarchical and episcopal government. Heylyn identified various phases in the history of English puritanism, describing the 1570s and 1580s as decades of expansion, followed by decline in the 1590s due to the deaths of prominent lay patrons and the successful efforts of the privy council in imprisoning and executing leading puritan agitators. At the accession of James I the puritans were, according to Heylyn, ‘brought so low’ that they might have been permanently suppressed, if the king had not been so taken with the pleasures of court life in England. His failure to act allowed puritanism to survive and eventually to overthrow royal power in the Civil War.1

Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700

Writing in the old Dictionary of National Biography, Sidney Lee described Lady Brilliana Harley as a ‘letter-writer’, and it is largely through the nineteenth-century edition of her letters, published by the Camden Society, that Lady Brilliana is still known today.1 The majority of the 205 letters in the Camden edition were written from her home of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire to her eldest son Edward between 1638, when he went to Oxford University, and 1643, when his mother died. They have been widely cited as evidence of the maternal and religious concerns of a seventeenth-century puritan gentlewoman, and Lee described them as ‘chiefly remarkable for their proofs of maternal affection. They abound in domestic gossip, religious reflections and sound homely advice.’2 Lee, however, underplayed the fact that a civil war was in the making when these letters were written. As a staunch puritan and parliamentarian, Lady Brilliana was engaged in the religious and political debates that led to warfare and, as I have remarked elsewhere, her letters ‘contain the most detailed information that we have about the outbreak of the civil war in Herefordshire’. They also record the active local political role that could be played by a woman during the civil war period.3

Samuel Clarke and the lives of godly women in seventeenth century England

Attempts to define early-modern English ‘puritanism’ and to agree on a common usage for the noun and adjective ‘puritan’ have been going on for well over 400 years. Contemporaries set about the task almost as soon as the religious phenomenon made its appearance in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation crisis, and historians and other scholars have continued their efforts, generating a lively academic controversy which shows no sign of abating. The central reason why the debate has gone on for so long is that it has proved exceptionally difficult to reach any common ground. Tudor and Stuart commentators frequently engaged in bitter and unresolved disputes about who or what should be labelled puritan, and historians from Clarendon onwards often seem only to have emulated them. As a consequence, for all the impressive scholarly attention directed to the question since the late sixteenth century, the meaning of the word ‘puritan’ remains unclear and the precise nature of early-modern ‘puritanism’ continues to evade analysis. In a colourful acknowledgement of the confusion and sterility which has marked much of the historiography of puritanism, Patrick Collinson has likened it to ‘a debate conducted among a group of blindfolded scholars in a darkened room about the shape and other attributes of the elephant sharing the room with them’.1

Gender Construction in Early Modern England and the Conduct Books of William Whately (1583–1639)

When Samuel Clarke’s The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age was published posthumously in 1683, the ‘godly life’ was a well-established genre of Puritan literature. Clarke himself had contributed to its popularity with his various compilations of’lives’ of ministers and laity culled primarily from published funeral sermons and spiritual biographies by other authors. Today such editions would be regarded as blatant plagiarism, but in the mid-seventeenth century, before the advent of the copyright laws, they were widely appreciated, and in the Introduction to this, his last work, Clarke wrote,n I have been encouraged to make this collection, and now to publish it, finding that my former labours in this kind have been accepted with the Saints, and in the Church of Christ: which is apparent, for that they have been printed four times in a few years space, and yet never less than a thousand at a time.

‘An Ancient Mother in our Israel’: Mary, Lady Vere

Conduct books, or household manuals offering advice about marriage and the ordering of domestic relationships, attained their greatest popularity in early modern England between the late sixteenth century and the Civil War. Many of these works, including William Whately’s popular A Bride-Bush , which ran into three editions between 1617 and 1623, and William Gouge’s influential Of Domesticall Duties , which first appeared in 1622, originated as sermons and were written by puritan preachers. They are also a valuable source of information about the construction of ideal masculine and feminine behaviour in the early modern period. At the start of A Bride-Bush , which was based on a marriage sermon, Whately asserted ‘I will make the ground of all my speech, those words of the Apostle Paul, Ephes. 5. 23. where hee saith, The Husband is the Wives head.’ Towards the end of the book he noted that the male sex is ‘preferred before the female in degree of place & dignity, as all men will yeeld that read what the Scriptures speake in that behalfe’.

Women in Focus

At her death aged ninety, Mary, Lady Vere was celebrated as a famous ‘Protestant Dorcas, full of good works, and alms-deeds’. Throughout her long life, Vere had consciously moulded herself as a godly woman whose personal motto, God will provide, was to be found written in her own hand ‘in the front of most of her books in her closet’.1 Religious piety could, as Peter Lake has argued, allow women to exercise ‘personal potency’ and at her funeral Vere’s authority within puritan circles was duly recognised by the preacher. In his funeral sermon William Gurnall recalled that ‘few ever exceeded her, in loving and honouring’ the ‘faithful ministers of Christ’ and described her zeal in finding ‘able and faithful ministers for those livings she had in her dispose’.2

The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700.

S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn, Northcote House, 1996, pp. xi + 113, £7.99 pb; S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds), Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, Routledge, 1996, pp. xii + 237, £40; £12.99 pb; Suzanne W. Hull, Women According to Men: The World of TudorStuart Women, Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 239, £15.95 pb; David Lindley, The Trials ofFrances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court ofKing James, Routledge, 1996, pp. 227, £13.99 pb; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. xxii + 442, £25.

Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War

Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560-1700 C.Durston & J.Eales - Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture P.Collinson - Puritans and the Church Courts, 1560-1640 M.Ingram - Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560-1660 M.Aston - The Puritan Death-bed, c.1560-c.1660 R. Houlbrooke - A Charitable Christian Hatred: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s P. Lake - A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism 1559-1642 J. Eales - Puritan Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution 1645-1660 C. Durston - From Puritanism to Dissent 1660-1700 J. Spurr