Contesting the press-oppressors of the age: the captivity narrative of William Okeley (1675)

Abstract

Catherine Vigier discusses the diffusion of radical ideas from the perspective of a captivity narrative, William Okeley’s Ebenezer, published by the radical printer Nathaniel Ponder. Her premise is that this captivity narrative is best apprehended as a literary text constructed in the light of political and ideological debates of its age since if offers a veiled criticism of events nearer home under the guise of a remote setting and plot. The publication of Okeley’s narrative is to be interpreted as an act of militant Protestantism in a culture of dissent at a time which witnessed increased repression against dissenters. She analyses biblical and mythological references in both Okeley’s narrative and Andrew Marvell’s pamphlets to support her claim that the Okeley text carried the polemic around Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d to a wider public and that publishing this captivity narrative, a popular literary genre, allowed Ponder and his collaborators to make a further case for freedom of speech.