A Collection of Ranter Writings

Smith Nigel

Description

The Ranters - like the Levellers and the Diggers - were a group of religious libertarians who flourished during the English Civil War (1642-1651), a period of social and religious turmoil which saw, in the words of the historian Christopher Hill, 'the world turned upside down'.



A Collection of Ranter Writings is the most notable attempt to anthologise the key Ranter writings, bringing together some of the most remarkable, visionary and unforgettable texts. The subjects range from the limits to pleasure and divine right, to social justice and collective action.



The Ranters have intrigued and captivated generations of scholars and philosophers. This carefully curated collection will be of great interest to historians, philosophers and all those trying to understand past radical traditions.
Foreword

Foreword to First Edition, 1983 by John Carey

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Further Reading

1. Abiezer Coppe

Preface to 'John the Divine's Divinity' (1648)

'Some Sweet Sips, of some Spiritual Wine' (1649)

'An Additional and Preambular Hint' to Richard Coppin's 'Divine Teachings' (1649)

'A Fiery Flying Roll' and 'A Second Fiery Flying Roule' (1649)

Letter from Coppe to Salmon and Wyke (c. April-June 1650)

'Divine Fire-Works' (1657)

2. Laurence Clarkson

'A Single Eye All Light, No Darkness' (1650)

Letter from Clarkson to William Rawlinson (mid-July-Oct 1650)

From 'The Lost Sheep Found' (1660)

3. Joseph Salmon

'A Rout, A Rout' (1649)

Letter from Salmon to Thomas Webbe (3 April 1650)

'Heights in Depths' (1651)

4. Jacob Bauthumley

'The Light and Dark Sides of God' (1650)

Index

Index of Biblical References

Sujets

• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Political Ideologies
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Histoire
• Religión
• Political science of religion
• Communism
• General officer
• Ideology
• Politics
• Great Britain
• Religion
• General
• History
• Communisme
• Social
• Europe
• Philosophie politique

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783710102
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

A Collection of Ranter WritingsA Collection of Ranter
Writings
Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom
in the English Revolution
Edited by
Nigel Smith

First published 2014 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
This collection copyright Nigel Smith 2014©
The right of the Nigel Smith to be identifed as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3361 8 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3360 1 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1010 2 PDF eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the
country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset by Andrew Miller
Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK
and
Edwards Bros in the United States of America
for the Ranters of Hull,
the Raunters of Oxford, and
the Rockers of New Jersey
‘ther’s a most glorious designe in it:
and equality, community and universall love’ in memoriam amicorum pretiosorum
Bill Readings (1960–1994)
Jeremy Maule (1952–1998)
‘Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,
We drove a-feld’
Contents
Foreword viii
Foreword to First Edition, 1983 John Carey xi
Preface xiv
Abbreviationsxvii
Introduction1
Further Reading 32
ABIEZER COPPE Preface to John the Divine’s Divinity (1648) 35
Some Sweet Sips, of some Spiritual Wine (1649) 36
‘An Additional and Preambular Hint’ to Richard Coppin’s Divine
Teachings (1649) 64A Fiery Flying Roll and A Second Fiery Flying Roule (1649) 72
Letter from Coppe to Salmon and Wyke (c. April–June 1650) 108
Divine Fire-Works (1657) 109
LAURENCE CLARKSON
A Single Eye All Light, No Darkness (1650) 114
Letter from ?Clarkson to William Rawlinson (mid-July–Oct. 1650) 128
From The Lost Sheep Found (1660)129
Anon., A JVSTJFJCATJON OF THE MAD CREW (1650) 141
JOSEPH SALMON
A Rout, A Rout (1649) 159
Divinity Anatomized (1649)170
Letter from Salmon to Thomas Webbe (3 April, 1650) 199
Heights in Depths (1651)200
JACOB BAUTHUMLEY
The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650) 222
Index 257
Index of Biblical References 263viii
Foreword
any forms of protest necessarily foreground the cause for which they fght:
better social justice, better political representation, ending gender, sexual or racial Mdiscrimination (or exploitation), protecting the environment and the climate,
and of late, protecting and promoting a faith, or a version of a faith. This usually means
commitment to some kind of revised social order, and along the way, protest may be linked
with a utopian vision of the future.
But there are other kinds of protest that refuse the above. Their force arises from such
deep unhappiness with the present predicament that it is driven by a need for immediate,
forceful rejection of the customs and ways of prevailing conditions because those old ways are
merely a compromised way of getting by. They won’t do, and there must be an immediate
noise of refusal. Ordinary life, they claim, is lived as a betrayal of another truth that is being
ignored or, what‘s worse, suppressed and even cruelly denied. So the Sex Pistols and the punk
revolution that they spearheaded were understood as a necessary angry deformation of the
polite conventions in 1970s Britain and elsewhere that were the carapace of class oppression.
For many people life in 1976 was not fun and had NO FUTURE. It had to be rejected by the
brusque, grotesque denunciation of English manners and institutions that was the punk song.
That’s how Greil Marcus saw matters in his widely revered Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of
the Twentieth Century (1989), 1–15, and he regarded the Ranters, notably Abiezer Coppe, as
seventeenth-century predecessors of Johnny Rotten (p. 27).
This was rebellion by means of a vulgar, foul-mouthed aesthetic of protest, one that has
not left our culture. Punk’s exuberant anger was directed at the shallow hypocrisy of the
establishment, an attitude that was bitterly sharpened by the sanctimonious politics that
followed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the stiletto moment of punk protest when, early on, the
four-letter F word was unsheathed on early evening TV, at a time when no one had dared do
that. Quite sensational, reducing a live interview to anarchy, this infamous ‘hit’ was probably
well-planned and very efective. Swearing has always been a direct way to expose moral
hypocrisy. Think it no longer matters? Think Pussy Riot, and its imprisoned members, two
of whom were whipped publicly in Sochi, Russia, the day before this foreword was written.
Such moments were not silly pranks during those quaint days before the latest age of
terror. They are in fact part of a larger, much longer history of agit-prop-style protest against
the profound inadequacy of the conventional ways of doing things. Sometimes politeness
is just not good enough. It may be necessary to invent an art movement in order to escape
into a frame of being where life becomes more authentic and more just, and this has certainly
been part of the mission of the earlier twentiety-century avant garde, or indeed the visionary
poetry of Blake and Shelley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Post-punk
anti-authoritarianism, witnessed in the acid house gatherings of the late 1980s and early 1990s,
has a literary component in the form of poetic declamation, a new expression of freedom
that aims to perpetuate the moment of protest. As Peter H. Marshall writes, ‘It fuses fact and
fction, history and myth, and opposes the primitive to the civilized. Rather than resorting Foreword ix
to agit-prop, it tries to politicize culture and transform it from the inside’ (Demanding the
Impossible: A History of Anarchism (2010), 494). Such a move seems like deploying a creative
anarchism within the heartland of mass popular culture.
The Situationist movement of the mid-twentieth century believed that individual
expression through directly lived experiences and the fulfllment of authentic desires had
been denigrated by commodity capitalism. The solution was to use art to make moments of
life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires;
everyday life was to be made liberating. Turning his attention to history, the Situationist
philosopher Raoul Vaneigem regarded the ‘Free Spirit’ mysticism of the Middle Ages as an
attempt by pious lay people in the past to assert a genuinely creative devotion, over and
against the repressive powers of national (or international) churches and the state, powers that
were at least disciplinary and at worst violent. For Vaneigem the ‘orthodox,’ sexually sterilized
mysticism of the famous medieval mystics of the monastery — Meister Eckhart, Suso, Tauler,
van Ruysbroeck, Groote — was ‘revenge of the spirit for attempts to emancipate the body’
by the ‘Free Spirit’ lay mystics (The Movement of the Free Spirit (1994), 91). The Ranters, he
thought, seemed to have brought this sense of liberation to bear on the rigors of Calvinist
discipline in mid-seventeeth-century England.
The Ranters.
Who fourished briefy in the middle of the seventeenth century, shortly after the
execution of King Charles I, the abolition of the House of Lords and the proclamation of a
republic. For a short time a number of unusual individuals loudly expressed their spiritual
liberty in the name of God: they swore, allegedly practiced free love, and their writings
were remarkable for their candid and daring originality. God was in them, surging through
them and giving their every action life and meaning. The most prominent Ranter, Abiezer
Coppe, saw this way as the ultimate just fellowship: sharing everything as the Bible tells us
to. Coppe’s example reminds Marcus of the wasted, noisy down and outs of Berkeley, CA
(Lipstick Traces, 434–35). For a while Laurence Clarkson developed a personal cosmology that
justifed unbounded free love, and, although their writings seem less startling, both Joseph
Salmon and Jacob Bauthumley let that God within them banish sin. They reconnected
with the idea of a sustaining natural world, which is where God also lived and to which
they would return at death. They re-imagined themselves as untainted, beautiful and wholly
at one with their redeemer, Jesus, with whom they enjoyed a fulflling mystical marriage.
Other Ranter writings contain a theology embodied and celebrated by sexual intercourse.
Orthodox theology and the social structure denied this and said people had to sufer in sin
and subjection, but the Ranters had other ideas.
Whatever the Ranters learned from their brief moment (they were all punished, most
recanted, and moved on), those who wrote each did something extraordinary with the
resources of the English language and the cultural reservoir that it had become by the
mid-seventeeth century. They invert, jest, make new certainties, new rhythms (sometimes
falteringly, sometimes with impressive struggle), swear, channel God, see God’s hand in the
events of their world, voice angels, and speak with the freshness of people who have fnally, at x Foreword
long, long last, come to terms with themselves. Sin is gone: I can be who I am. It is altogether
a remarkable verbal architecture and why they are worth reading.
The literature that is still read today from the seventeenth century i