Peter Lake

Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England

T “public sphere” has become ubiquitous in the historiography and in historically oriented literary criticism of early modern England. In this article, we argue that the phrase does have real efficacy in discussions of early modern England. However, we want to use “public sphere” in slightly different ways than most scholars have done. In particular, we argue that a narrative of the emergence of the public sphere, in the ways we will define it, can be used to talk coherently about the entire period from the Reformation into the eighteenth century. The “public sphere” has been moving backward in time. The term “bourgeois public sphere” originally referred to a particular kind of Enlightenment discussion. However, “public sphere” now appears frequently in articles and monographs referring to the Restoration, the Interregnum, the Civil War, and it is even invading the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.

The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I

In a sermon preached at Hampton Court on September 30, 1606, John King proclaimed that “our Solomon or Pacificus liveth.” James I had “turned swords into sithes and spears into mattocks, and set peace within the borders of his own kingdoms and of nations about us.” His care for the “Church and maintenance to it” was celebrated. All that remained was for his subjects to lay aside contentious matters and join “with his religious majesty in propagation of the gospel and faith of Christ.” The sermon was the last in a series of four preached—and later printed—at the kings behest before an unwilling audience of Scottish Presbyterians. The quartet outlined Jamess standing as a ruler by divine right and laid down the conceptual foundations of the Jacobean church. A godly prince, exercising his divinely ordained powers as head of church and state, advised by godly bishops, themselves occupying offices of apostolic origin and purity, would preside over a new golden age of Christian peace and unity. A genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained; peace and order would prevail. James I was rex pacificus , a new Constantine, a truly godly prince. As he himself observed in 1609, “my care for the Lords spiritual kingdom is so well known, both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books.”

Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context

The categories and assumptions that typically frame discussions of the relations between “Catholicism” and the Elizabethan state seem clear enough in many ways. Two flatly opposed views confront us. On the one hand, some historians believe that the activities of Catholic engages, both clerical and lay, were essentially “religious.” Attempts by the Protestant establishment to recast them as political and to organize them under the sign of “treason” were mere fantasies, invented for their own nefarious purposes by Protestant zealots, informers on the make, and Machiavellian politiques. At its most extreme this view presents the Elizabethan regime as fundamentally evil and interprets all its intelligence activities against notional Catholic sedition or subversion as mere pretexts for religious persecution.1 On the other hand, many orthodox narratives of the religious politics of the period take as a given the link between the policy imperatives of European Catholic states and the existence of some form of self-conscious English Catholicism (even if the writers of such narratives are unclear about how far Catholic political activism was dispersed among those who felt consciously un-Protestant). Indeed, the categories used by contemporaries to talk about these things, centering on the dichotomies or binary oppositions between politics and treason (or resistance), on the one hand, and conscience/religion and loyalty (or obedience), on the other, have been perpetuated in much modern writing, largely without any analysis of the contemporary ideologies that informed that rhetoric. Thus the magisterial historian of the Elizabethan regime and state, Conyers Read, could describe the activities of the seminary priests as political (because of their dissemination of “potentially traitorous doctrines”) without giving very much thought to the media through which those doctrines were dispersed, or indeed to what different context(s) might have rendered their

“Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”

In this article we address the topic of intra-Puritan doctrinal debate and, by examining the mechanisms whereby the godly in the capital tried, if not to conclude then at least to control and ameliorate their in-house doctrinal disputes, to reconstruct some of the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—whereby doctrinal “consensus” or “orthodoxy” was constructed, policed, and reproduced among the godly. Thus we hope to penetrate the shadowy world of what one might term the London Puritan underground. What emerges from this scrutiny is a world of interministerial dispute and rivalry, of lay activism, based on an urgent word and sermon-centered piety, that found its natural expression as much in the conventicle and the godly discussion group as in the public congregation and clerically delivered sermon or lecture. Here operated an overlapping series of networks of orally transmitted rumors and stories, of manuscript tracts and sermon notes, of conferences, conversations, and arbitrations both formal and informal. Here the reputations of the Puritan clergy were made and maintained, and the nature of orthodoxy debated and defined through mechanisms and exchanges that remain, for the most part, closed to us. This obscurity is not an accident. Only rarely did the interventions of authority or the anxiety or outraged amour propre of some wronged participant combine to leave traces, either in court records or the fulminations of the pamphlet press, of what appears to have been a very active underworld of dispute, discussion, and display.

The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist

It has become a commonplace of modern historical scholarship that most Elizabethan Protestants regarded the pope as Antichrist. The present article is an attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of that commonplace. It does not seek to cast doubt on the existence of such a common perception of the pope as Antichrist. However, it will be argued that within that consensus, and to an extent masked by it, there existed very important implicit differences over the consequences of that doctrine.

Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England.

These essays examine Protestantism in Tudor England, seeking to give a sense of the clash of ideas which produced the political developments of the sixteenth century in Church history.

Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson

Robert Sanderson was a Calvinist, indeed, he was an evangelical Calvinist anxious to impart, through pulpit and press, the central tenets of Calvinism to the laity. He also hated Puritanism and said so loud and often. During the 1630s Sanderson cooperated enthusiastically with the Laudian regime. As a Royalist during the Civil War, he was one of the divines taken by Charles I to the Isle of Wight to provide spiritual counsel as the king struggled to save the church from its Puritan enemies. Nevertheless, during the 1650s Sanderson felt able to take the engagement and to give over the use of the prayer book in order to preserve his place in the ministry. At the Restoration, however, he returned to the establishment as the bishop of Lincoln, in which role he proved himself less than sympathetic to the nonconformists. In short, Sandersons career is difficult to accommodate within many of the received categories currently in favor in the religious history of the period. As if to prove the point, Sanderson figures prominently both in C. H. George and K. Georges attempt to demonstrate the homogeneity of English Protestant opinion before 1640 and J. Sears McGees assault on precisely that proposition. Sanderson seems to offer particular difficulties to those of us committed to the notion that the English church was dominated by Calvinism down to at least the 1620s and that thereafter the confrontation between Calvinism and Arminianism represented the crucial division in English religious opinion before the early 1640s.

Business as usual? The immediate reception of Hooker's Ecclesiastical polity

The ideological valence or resonance of Hookers Ecclesiastical polity has proved to be a controversial subject. This article attempts to bring to bear on the problem the immediate response to Hookers book of a number of contemporaries – moderate Puritans, avant-garde conformists and Catholics. It concludes that none of these groups saw the Polity as a mere restatement of English reformed orthodoxy, the continuation of English conformist business as usual, and suggests that modern commentators should take these contemporary evaluations into serious account in their own analyses of Hooker.

Information systems management in the big data era

Introducing Big Data Strategy Structure Style Staff Statistical Thinking Synthesis Systems Sources Security Technical Insights The Future of IS in the Era of Big Data

Periodization, Politics, and “The Social”

This is a book the chronological span, source base, and methods of which go far beyond my competence as a research historian. My comments therefore should be construed as those of someone interested but by no means expert in the sort of social history of which Marjorie McIntosh is an acknowledged master. Certainly I am entirely unqualified to judge the statistical methods and assumptions through which her major conclusions have been reached. However, a number of themes and questions central to the book do cluster around some issues with which I am familiar. I am thinking here of the nature of both the Christian community and the forms of social regulation and discipline used to maintain that community and of the supposed relationship of those practices with various sorts of intellectual, religious, and cultural change very often summed up under the rough and general heading of puritanism. It is therefore as a student of early modem (i.e., in my case Elizabethan and early Stuart) religion and politics, or to put it at its most generous-and using the term only in its woolliest, most cosily meaningless (Princetonian) sense-of culture, that I can hope to comment on McIntoshs arguments and findings. The two things about the book that strike me as major advances are the nature of the period addressed and the sorts of sources used. I would want to endorse in the strongest possible terms the observations that McIntosh makes about the traditional schemas of periodization in terms of which the questions she is addressing have hitherto been approached. Early modernists are far too ignorant about the nature of late medieval society and politics. The traditional medieval/early modern divide has a great deal to answer for in sheering off the fifteenth from the sixteenth centuries. Historians of Tudor religion, politics, and society would have spared themselves a great deal of grief if they had not proceeded from some sort of dimly perceived medieval background toward whatever aspect of modernity they thought they were studying.1 In my own subfield