‘The best help God's people have’: Manuscript Culture and the Construction of Anti-Calvinist Communities in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

In 1636, the godly minister John Vicars lamented the adverse effects of censorship on the publication of Calvinist works on predestination: 'Manuscripts are now the best help God's people have to vindicate the truth, printing being nowadays prohibited to them, especially if their writings have any least tang or tincture of opposition to Arminianism yea or even to popery itself.'1 Vicars's complaint is couched in the rhetoric of disenfranchisement: while the supporters of 'Arminianism' or 'even ... popery' enjoy the endorsement of the licensing authorities, 'God's people' are prevented from claiming the same privileges.2 The feelings of exclusion articulated in this statement, Vicars's sense that the godly can only speak from the margins if their voice is to be heard at all, depends in large part on the material media through which political opinion is expressed: print spells out the official version of religious truth, whilst godly doctrine is relegated to the more private, and at times necessarily clandestine, form of manuscript circulation.Historians of English church politics in the early seventeenth century have long realised the importance of attending to the specific modes and strategies through which religious ideas are produced and disseminated; they have become attuned, in other words, not only to the nuances of theological and ecclesiological argument, but to the ways in which those arguments are expressed. One very fruitful line of investigation has been to follow Vicars's lead, as it were, and to address the role of censorship in the political developments of the 1620s and 1630s. Scholars such as S. Mutchow Towers, Cyndia Clegg and Nicholas Tyacke have closely analysed the operation of the licensing systems under James I and Charles I, and have made powerful arguments for the impact of print on the political and religious culture of early Stuart England.3 A different, but equally promising route has recently been taken by Anthony Milton's article 'The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach'.4 Milton's astute inquiry into 'the ideological context of Laudianism' is not so much concerned with the distinction between manuscript and print transmission as with the political significance of form and genre, arguing that the often ephemeral nature of polemical publications had a vital impact on the formation of anti-Calvinist discourse. According to Milton, the sources for answering questions about how Laudian policies were communicated and presented 'are not weighty theological treatises, but rather a whole series of minor works composed in defence of the policies of the 1630s - pamphlets, sermons, minitreatises - written by a series of minor and often rather obscure authors, not always very comprehensive in their coverage of the relevant issues and not produced in a systematic way.'5 Looking in detail at these minor authors and their works reveals the fluid and unstable processes through which Laudian ideology was constructed: 'Laudianism itself had an unstable quality - the explanations and defences of Laudian policies were constantly on the move, as were their exponents, adjusting and developing their ideas.'6 At the same time, however, Milton's analysis emphasises the crucial role played by these minor polemicists in assembling and shaping systems of thought: they 'not only expressed, but extended (and at times even initiated) government policies by raising the political and ideological stakes.'7Peter McCullough's 'Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626-1642' takes yet another perspective on this nexus of concerns.8 Focusing on a central episode in the bibliographical politics of the early seventeenth century, 'the posthumous competition over the print publication of works by Lancelot Andrewes', McCullough shifts our attention from rhetorical to editorial interventions.9 Whereas Milton emphasises how the choice of textual form can inflect the communication of polemical content (a pamphlet and a heavyweight theological tract may convey the same message in radically different ways), McCullough foregrounds the importance of paratextual signs - the editorial decisions that determine the arrangement and presentation of an argument. …