“Printed in the seventh year of the authors oppression”: debt, imprisonment, and the radicalization of Henry Adis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the prison writings of Henry Adis. Writing from prison in the mid-seventeenth century, Adis rejects the status quo of the changing political regimes and develops a radicalized narrative persona that evolves throughout his prison writings, evolving from that of petitioning debtor to that of aggressive polemicist. This paper considers the effects of imprisonment on Adis’ polemic and then suggests that Adis’ radicalization is a response to a conflict with what he sees as a broken criminal justice system rather than a response to the emerging political and religious tensions that accompanied the Interregnum. Adis’ prison writings illustrate how the the seventeenth-century carceral experience could be formative to the counter-political movements of the period as much as a punitive measure against dissent.