Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s

Description

A significant collection of essays by leading scholars on the vital decade of the 1670s in Britain, Ireland and North America. This was a period of profound tension and uncertainty (culminating in the exclusion crisis of 1678-83),, in which the 1660s restoration settlement began to break down, and debates came to seem much more complex and ambiguous than the earlier simple polarity between royalist Anglicanism and a radical, non-conformist opposition. New issues included the disturbing prospect of open catholicism at court, realisation that religious dissent would not simply be persecuted out of existence, confusion over the correct response to the rise of Louis XIV’s France on the continent, the evident emergence of public opinion in the form of the press and coffee house culture;, new questions about the proper relationship between England, Ireland, Scotland and the North American colonies, and refashionings of national identities connected to all these issues. These essays explore the political, cultural and religious turbulence which resulted; and break new ground in the interdisciplinary study of the newly confusing, but highly innovative world. Taken together they suggest the 1670s was a crucial period in the emergence of ‘modern’ assumptions and concerns.

Sujets

• Medieval
• Histoire
• Reino Unido
• United Kingdom
• Great Britain
• History
• Royaume-Uni
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783164639
• Langue: English

Extrait

Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s
Religion, Education and Culture
Series Editors: William K. Kay (Glynd r University, Wrexham) Leslie J. Francis (University of Warwick) Jeff Astley (University of Durham)
This series addresses issues raised by religion and education within contemporary culture. It is intended to be of benefit to those involved in professional training as ministers of religion, teachers, counsellors, psychologists, social workers and health professionals, while also contributing to the theoretical development of the academic fields from which this training is drawn.
Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s
Edited by
TONY CLAYDON and THOMAS N. CORNS
The Contributors, 2011 Cover image: Mark Evans / iStockphoto
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2401-1 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-463-9
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction - Living with masquerade: the recent scholarship of the 1670s in the Stuart realms
TONY CLAYDON and THOMAS N. CORNS
1 Paradise postponed: the nationhood of nuns in the 1670s
NICKY HALLETT
2 The Anglo-Scottish union negotiations of 1670
CLARE JACKSON
3 Bunyan s certain place : fleeing Esau in the 1670s
BETH LYNCH
4 Literary innovation and social transformation in the 1670s
NIGEL SMITH
5 Great agents for libertinism : Rochester and Milton
JAMES GRANTHAM TURNER
6 From the hearts of the people : loyalty, addresses and the public sphere in the exclusion crisis
TED VALLANCE
7 King Philip s war and the edges of civil religion in 1670s London
ELLIOTT VISCONSI
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the contributors for their patience and professionalism in dealing with their enquiries, William Kay for his key role as our link with the press, and Linda Jones for her invaluable and essential help with the practical organization, indexing and copy- editing of the volume. This work is hers as much as it is ours.
Contributors
Tony Claydon is Professor of Early Modern History at Bangor University, Wales. He has researched on various aspects of politics and religion in late Stuart England, and is author of studies of William III, of sermon culture, and of Europe and the Making of England, 1660-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) - an extended examination of the English sense of participation in a Protestant international and a continental Christendom between the Restoration and the accession of George III. With Tom Corns, he is instigator and organizer of the Bangor Conference on the Restoration, which regularly brings together the world s leading researchers on the era in history, literature, religion and culture.
Thomas N. Corns is Professor of English at Bangor University. His recent publications include a biography of John Milton (with Gordon Campbell) and an edition of the complete works of Gerrard Winstanley (with David Loewenstein). He is currently working on a new scholarly edition of Paradise Lost (also with David Loewenstein).
Nicky Hallett is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of various publications on women s spiritual writing, including Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Ashgate, 2007) and Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent (Ashgate, 2007).
Clare Jackson is Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Restoration Scotland: Politics, Religion and Ideas 1660-1690 (Woodbridge, 2003) and a number of articles on the history of ideas in early modern Scotland. She is also co-editor of The Historical Journal .
Beth Lynch is Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Newn ham College, Cambridge. Her publications include John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
and articles on seventeenth-century literature and printing history. She is co-editor of, and contributor to, Roger L Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Ashgate, 2008).
Nigel Smith is currently Chair of the Renaissance Studies Committee at Princeton University. His major works include the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell s Poems , Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale University Press, 1994), and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford University Press, 1989). He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983). A biography of Marvell, a study of Milton s poetry and prose, and (with Nicholas McDowell) an extensive anthology of seventeenth-century radical literature, are forthcoming.
James Grantham Turner is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published four books on aspects of seventeenth-century literature and culture, from the university presses of Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as numerous articles.
Edward (Ted) Vallance is Reader in Early Modern History at Roe -hampton University. His publications include The Glorious Revolution: 1688 and Britain s Fight for Liberty (Little, Brown, 2006), A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women Who Fought for our Freedoms (Little, Brown, 2009), and books and articles on the notion of conscience and the use of casuistry in early modern England. He is also an editor on the Pickering and Chatto mono graph series Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period .
Elliott Visconsi is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. He specializes in the literature, law, and political thought of seventeenth century England, with special emphasis on the Restoration period. His first book was Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Cornell University Press, 2008). He is currently working on a second book - The Invention of Civil Religion: The Literature of Church and State in Postrevolutionary England and America .
Introduction
Living with masquerade: the recent scholar ship of the 1670s in the Stuart realms
TONY CLAYDON AND THOMAS N. CORNS
For many years, study of the Restoration decades has been a poor relation in writing on the Stuart age. Compared with the excitements of the Civil Wars - and the bitter disagreements about their causes - which fed interest in the first half of the seventeenth century, the period after 1660 was a relatively sleepy backwater. Far fewer historical works dealt with the reign of Charles II than with that of his father (though the quality of many of them was extremely high); and if interest in Milton kept literary studies alive, it was curious that this great author tended to be seen as a radical of the mid century crisis, in ways which ignored the Restoration context of his late masterpieces, Paradise Lost (first edition: 1667), Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (both 1671).
In the last couple of decades, however, the situation has been transformed. Interest in the later Stuart era has grown exponentially and has been fed by a number of intellectual developments which are clearly evident in the essays presented here: in fact, these contributions could be seen as dispatches from the most rapidly ex pand ing frontiers of our understanding of Charles II s epoch. First, scholars across the early modern era have realized the benefits of inter disciplinarity. For an age when literature was heavily engaged in politics, and for an age obsessed with the troubled issues of representing reality, it is essential that historians, art historians, and literary scholars talk to each other. 1 This conversation has been particularly fruitful for decades in which such canonical writers as Milton, Marvell, Rochester, Bunyan and Dryden intervened actively in the controversies of the day, and when opinion was as likely to be shaped by poetry or satirical print as by prose oratory. 2 Second, scholars in the whole range of disciplines have been rediscovering the role of religion. Where it was once thought the exhaustion of civil wars and the advance of natural science in the later Stuart age had produced a secularizing scepticism about faith, there is a new realization that politics, society and culture were still crucially in fluenced by the varieties of spiritual belief. Even if religious debates had been recast by the experience of the mid century turmoil, they were every bit as passionate, and as rewarding to examine, as those which led to the disasters the 1640s. 3
Third, the endless search for the origins of modernity among the intellectual community has begun to home in on the late seventeenth century in the Stuart realms. This was partly stimulated by the early work of the German sociologist, J rgen Habermas, who influentially suggested this time and place saw the earliest emergence of a public sphere that would eventually transform relations between rulers and ruled (Habermas, 1980). For the first time, Habermas suggested, forums for public discussion - such as a relatively free press, and places to talk about its contents such as the popular coffee houses of the day - opened a space in which citizens could