Abstract
This paper examines the reception of Marvellian state satire by the nonconformist community and, in particular, by Charles Morton’s dissenting academy at Newington Green during the early 1680s. These revelations surfaced during a bitter pamphlet controversy in the early years of the eighteenth century between Samuel Wesley senior (a former pupil at the academy, who had taken Anglican orders) and Samuel Palmer, a nonconformist divine. Wesley, it transpired, was familiar not only with the satires of Marvell (whom he wished to emulate), but with two highly influential pieces of early modern pornography: Nicolas Chorier’s Aloisaae Sigeaae Toletanae Satyra Sotadica, and the burlesque drama, Sodom, sometimes attributed to the Earl of Rochester (though Wesley casts doubt upon this). The Wesley-Palmer exchange also illuminates the transmission and reproduction of these materials – importantly, in the case of the state satires, before the Glorious Revolution made possible their print publication in the series of Poems on Affairs of State. Unexpected as this configuration of texts is, it suggests that Marvellian state satire and pornography were, to borrow a phrase from Robert Darnton, the forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary England.
Highlights
Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester In February 1698, the Anglican clergyman, Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) delivered a sermon in Westminster and the City on the reformation of manners. His text was Psalm 94, verse 6: ‘Who will rise up for me against the Evil-doers, or who will stand up for me against the Workers of Iniquity?’1 One of his principal targets was ‘our infamous Theatres, which seem to have done more Mischief, than Hobes [sic] himself or our new Atheistical Clubs, to the Faith and Morals of the Nation’.2. He went on to elaborate his claim about the moral dangers of theatregoing at some length: What Communion hath the Temple of God with Idols, with those abominable mysteries of Iniquity which outdo the old Fescennina of the Heathens, the lewd Orgies of Bacchus, and the impious Feasts of Isis and Priapus? I know not how any Persons can profitably, or decently, present themselves here before Gods Holy Oracle, who are frequently present at those Schools of Vice, and Nurseries of Profaneness and Lewdness, to unlearn there what they are here taught, out of Gods Holy Word
While it is possible that Wesley was alluding to Dryden or Catullus, it is far more likely that at the back of his mind was a book – a different kind of satire – to which he had been exposed some fifteen years or so earlier, but which as we shall see, cropped up in a letter he wrote to his friend Dr Charles Goodall (1642-1712), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and friend of John Locke, only a few months after delivering his sermon to the Society for the Reformation of Manners: namely, Aloisaæ Sigeaæ Toletanæ Satyra Sotadica, de Arcanis Amoris et Veneris
The claim being made on the title page is to the effect that this sotadical satire – alluding to Sotades, an obscene and subversive Alexandrian poet of the third century BCE – on the secrets of Love and Venus had originally been written in Spanish by Aloisia Sigea of Toledo and translated into Latin by Johannes Meursius
Summary
In February 1698, the Anglican clergyman, Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) delivered a sermon in Westminster and the City on the reformation of manners.
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