English Protestant Research Articles

Introduction. Nineteenth-Century Protest Movements in Britain: A Survey of Historians’ Approaches

This article surveys the historiography of nineteenth and early twentieth century British protest movements and thus provides a broad framework for the contributions to this volume. It begins by providing a portrait of some of the key developments in the field, with a focus on the impact of post-war social history and the emergence of ‘history from below’. It then details some of the ways in which this body of work was built upon, challenged and consolidated in subsequent decades. A discussion of the type of sources exploited by historians working from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective is followed by some thoughts on the current state of protest studies in a British context. The contested ‘Britishness’ of nineteenth-century social and political movements is considered, along with the question of how historians today continue to study ordinary men and women in the past, and the movements they belonged to, in the words of Malcolm Chase, with both ‘empathy’ and ‘authenticity’.

US Intangible Economic Cultural Capital (Outline for Characterization)

Countries differ in their prevailing values, norms, traditions, perceptions, etc., what can be called intangible cultural capital. Since economic relations permeate all relationships between people, a special place in cultural capital is occupied by its economic dimension. The United States is, in every sense of the word, a unique country with a distinct economic cultural capital. Its specificity is determined by the fact that this community was formed as a result of multi-tribal and multilingual immigration, adopting the so-called American Creed as a dominant worldview, which is based mainly on the values of British Protestant settlers. With vast untapped natural resources and the complete absence of feudal relations, the newcomers had a wide scope of economic activity with an absolute equality of opportunities. Individualism, partly inherited from the English nuclear family, has risen to become the prevailing principle of their behavior. This individualism, voluntaristic in nature, did not preclude individuals from uniting freely in various social entities, while also allowing for easy separation. Americans placed emphasis in their economic activity on achievement, success, the measure of which was perceived to be wealth. The accumulation of wealth was not and is not condemned; it is believed that its source is primarily the hard work of its owners who perform important social functions (investment, development of new technologies, etc.). Meanwhile, the causes of poverty, both in the past and present, are often seen in the poor people's own misbehavior. One cannot rule out that the active influx of immigrants with different cultural capital may in the future provoke changes in the American Creed.

Debating Biblical Translation in Late Elizabethan England

Abstract This article explores how Protestants defended the co-existence of multiple translations of the Bible into English in Elizabethan England. The matter of biblical plurality is considered through the prism of the debates surrounding bible translation which occurred throughout the 1580s between the Catholic translator of the Bible into English, Gregory Martin (c. 1542–1582), and the English Protestant polemicist William Fulke (1537/8–1589). It is contended that this debate, which has tended to be cast as a storm in a teacup, reveals how Protestants responded, innovatively, to the publication of the Catholic English New Testament. Attention is paid to how Martin attacked the existence of the many different Protestant English bible translations in circulation and, reciprocally, how Fulke defended them. This study of the Martin and Fulke debate thereby unsettles some long-standing assumptions about the combative relationship between different versions of the English Bible and it points, instead, to ways in which contemporaries might have seen the plurality of translations as spiritually and polemically advantageous. Fulke's arguments help us to comprehend how, prior to early seventeenth-century attempts to restrict the existence of multiple English bibles, some Elizabethans responded to, and even defended, the plurality of English bible translations which had come to exist.

Crying in the Womb: Emotions, Sound, and Personhood in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT Crying in the womb (vagitus uterinus) was an extraordinary phenomenon or prodigy by which a foetus in the later stages of gestation could be heard to cry before its birth. This article traces the way that crying in the womb in early modern England was consistently interpreted, across religious, medical, and popular texts, as an emotional expression. Hearing crying in the womb affirmed the unseen presence of a body and soul, already miserable with sin and able to convey this humanness, and affect the emotions of others, with the sound of its voice. This article reveals that hearing non-verbal emotional expressions was central to the early configuration of English Protestant personhood.

Exile in Barbary: English‐speaking expatriates, biblical theology, and mercantile ethics in the seventeenth‐century Maghreb☆

AbstractDuring the seventeenth century, thousands of English‐speaking Protestants went to the Maghreb as captives, diplomats, traders, and travellers. Distant from the guiding and controlling hands of monopoly trading companies and the established churches, and placed under various pressures by non‐Christian neighbours, colleagues, and captors, these Protestants faced the temptation (or opportunity) to compromise or abandon their Christianity and nationality to survive and thrive in their new circumstances. Most English‐speaking residents, whether free expatriates, captives, or converts, felt a tension between attraction to local norms and longing for their lives at home. Using a vast and little‐known collection of merchant correspondence and financial records, this article explores the tension of exile in the professional, material, religious, moral, and ethical lives and views of long‐term free English‐speaking residents (‘expatriates’) in the Maghreb. I argue that the biblical‐theological framework of exile, widespread in contemporary English culture and brought to mind by their circumstances, provided many expatriates with a way of understanding their lives and a set of ethical principles for conducting them appropriately. By considering the ways in which British Protestants made use of this framework, historians can better make sense of their experiences of living in the early modern Islamic world.

FACTORS OF TENSION IN SOCIETY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT

The article is devoted to the study of the causes of social tension in Northern Ireland in the 60s of the XX century. The author analyzes the social, economic and political causes of disunity and instability in the region. Special attention is paid to the problem of the existence of two ethno-religious communities: Irish Catholics and British Protestants. The economic heterogeneity of society, disproportions in representation in legislative and executive authorities, and the lack of mechanisms for protecting the rights of minorities are considered. These factors, according to the author, contributed to the growth of social tension and radicalization of communities.

Riches and Poverty in English Protestant Culture, c.1550–1800: Vernacularising the Parable of Dives and Lazarus

Riches and Poverty in English Protestant Culture, c.1550–1800: Vernacularising the Parable of Dives and Lazarus

The Politics of Protestant Missions in the English Overseas Territories, 1660–1700

Abstract Through the later seventeenth century, Protestant missions in English America were surrounded by controversy. Missionaries working with Amerindians and enslaved Africans were accused of threatening the stability of overseas dominions. Crown officials were alleged to have impeded evangelism, and colluded in a culture of colonial godlessness. In modern scholarship, these conflicts have been located within a context of long-term tension between “religion” and “empire.” This article suggests that they were rooted in the transatlantic divisions within English Protestantism, and in political conditions peculiar to the 1660 Restoration. Colonial missions developed competitively and acrimoniously, when the Church of England vied against Protestant rivals in America, and when ecclesiastical policy in England remained unsettled. Battles for converts between Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists stirred disputes over the management of England’s multi-confessional dominions. Simultaneously, they raised questions over how a colonizing kingdom could export the reformed religion, when its own confessional environment was severely divided.

Between Jerusalem and Babylon: Catholic Discourses of Israel and National Identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ca. 1560–1625)

Abstract This article examines how English Catholics imagined Jerusalem and Israel in relation to themselves, their nation and their Church. While English Protestant uses of Jerusalem imagery have been well-studied, their inter-confessional context has received less attention, and yet it was crucial to shaping them. Catholic deployments of Old Testament images and typology were no less sophisticated and significant than Protestant ones; English Catholic texts show how multivalent imagery of Jerusalem and its antithesis, Babylon, could be used both to express and to attempt to resolve tensions between the officially Protestant nation and the “true” Church. Exploring Catholic conceptions of Jerusalem, England and the Church is valuable because it offers insight into the culture that formed English Catholic recusants, missionaries, exiles and politicians, but also because it is important to a properly integrated account of the religious politics of England.

British Protestant missions and the conversion of Europe, 1600–1900. Edited by Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villani. (Studies in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism.) Pp. xii + 289 incl. 15 figs. Abingdon–New York: Routledge, 2021. £36.99 (paper). 978 0 367 54611 3

British Protestant missions and the conversion of Europe, 1600–1900. Edited by Simone Maghenzani and Stefano Villani. (Studies in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism.) Pp. xii + 289 incl. 15 figs. Abingdon–New York: Routledge, 2021. £36.99 (paper). 978 0 367 54611 3

Puritanism, Spiritual Kinship, and the Lord's Supper in Elizabethan and early Stuart England

AbstractThe rhetoric of spiritual kinship was a pungent part of a “discourse of separation” which materialized among the English puritans in post-Reformation England. Using print literature aimed at properly preparing the godly to come “worthily” to the Lord's Supper, most of which was penned by puritan divines, this article examines family language in use among the godly in the context of the communion meal in the Elizabethan and early Stuart national church. This rhetoric signaled a real identity – an identity tied intimately to the nexus of right doctrine and a certain type of English Protestant practice. The present essay traces out the theological framework that buttressed this identity and suggests the ways in which family language fostered both inclusive and exclusive responses among the godly as they sought to “rightly” celebrate the sacrament. It argues that the use of the language of spiritual kinship helped the godly come to terms with their uncomfortable position in a national church they considered insufficiently reformed, and with the difficulties that ensued from “holy” living, as naturally unholy beings, in a fallen world. This study contributes to our understanding of the informal mechanisms by which early modern English Protestants could navigate the choppy waters of social and religious life in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. More generally, this consideration of a distinctive puritan usage of familiar scriptural language to make sense of England's religious landscape in this period underscores the interpretive importance of remaining acutely aware of discursive context in early modern religious sources.

Tacit Narratives in the Manuscript Collections of Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton

Over the past two decades, the history of early modern archives has been a topic of considerable interest among historians, and their research has drawn attention to the complex motives and commitments that inspired individuals, communities, and institutions to create, collect, preserve, and use archives in the early modern period. Their research also offers insights into what Eric Ketelaar has called the “tacit narratives of power and knowledge” woven into the formation, preservation, and use of archives and opens up new avenues for exploring the social history of archives. The English Protestant Reformation has provided the backdrop for some of this work, highlighting the ways in which post-Reformation libraries functioned as “polemical weapons” in political and religious struggles to control the historical narrative about the roots of the Reformation. The libraries built by the antiquarian collectors Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton in the 16th and 17th centuries furnish useful examples of the kinds of tacit narratives embedded in the selection, preservation, and use of post-Reformation manuscript collections. This article draws on the research undertaken by early modern historians into the collecting and compiling practices underpinning the formation and use of the Parker and Cotton manuscript collections to demonstrate how their work is helping to illuminate the tacit narratives embedded in early modern archives as well as broadening and deepening the social history of archives.

Milton’s Early Modern English Protestant Paradise Lost in a Modern Mexican Christmastide Civic Drama

Abstract: This article discusses a Mexican pastorela —a genre of short, civic drama celebrating the Nativity typically staged in December—that instantiates a significant intersection of global literatures and global Christianities: El Paraíso perdido: Drama en 4 actos arreglado por Ambrosio Nieto, sobre la inspiración del inmortal Milton [ Paradise Lost: Drama in 4 Acts Arranged by Ambrosio Nieto, Upon the Inspiration of the Immortal Milton ] (ca. 1920–1950). Nieto incisively adapts Milton’s epic to produce a delightful drama that integrates features specific to Mexico’s rich literary and cultural traditions and to foster a modern ecumenical Christianity.

From Rejection to Reconciliation: Protestantism and the Image in Early Modern England

AbstractThe idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only came to terms with the image but actively embraced it. In identifying patterns of thinking within a wide body of contemporary comment, we offer a chart in the mode of early modern figurative diagrams to emphasize the diverse criteria that Protestants weighed when considering whether an image was suitable for its intended purpose, from the circumstances of its making and using through audience response to location, medium, subject matter, and patron. In doing so, we stress the importance of historicizing the sense of the terms civil and religious use, which do not map neatly onto a modern reading of secular and sacred spaces. We further illustrate how the criteria of the model operated in practice, through detailed analysis of two extant artworks commissioned by committed Protestants, highlighting keen engagement with pictorial art in theory and in practice. The shift in emphasis from rejection to reconciliation captures the spirit of English Protestantism's negotiation and rapprochement with the image over the period ca. 1560–ca. 1640.

Readers, Writers, and Riots: Race, Print Culture, and the Public in Liverpool 8 in the Early 1980s

AbstractThis article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a collective sense of L8 as a marker of identity and belonging in a city and a nation that otherwise often harbored racialized hostility to the residents’ economic and political interests. Such a commitment to the locale, the author asserts, became a key factor in organizing the collective action taken by the residents in the 1981 Toxteth protests. Before and after that event, the neighborhood's print culture served to justify to residents the reasons for taking violent action against the state. Equally, this source material highlights the fissures and divergences between neighbors in their deliberations over the definitions—and limitations—of such a community and its relation to the nation. The author thus offers new ways to think about Black British protest in close relation to the specific political and social dynamics of neighborhoods across Britain.

Oliver Cromwell and the Devil in Worcester

ABSTRACT On the eve of the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Oliver Cromwell was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil. This article examines the construction of this legend and places it in the larger context of English Protestant thought about the ‘ancient enemy’. It argues that the story originally arose from the circumstances of Cromwell’s death on 3 September 1658, but later came to focus on events before the battle seven years earlier. The legend illustrates the persistence of ideas about a physical Devil, despite the emphasis on Satan as an invisible tempter in English theology. This portrayal emerged from the polemics of the 1640s and 1650s and had something in common with the demonization of the royalist commander Prince Rupert. But it drew mainly on earlier stories such as the legend of Johann Faust, which provided the core themes in the tale of Cromwell’s supposed diabolism.

Naturalism in the Christian Imagination: Providence and Causality in Early Modern England

Naturalism in the Christian Imagination: Providence and Causality in Early Modern England

Fear and Trembling: Performing the Protestant Conscience in Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy

With its glorified ghost, godly avenger, and idolatrous Tyrant, Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy appears to offer a thinly veiled allegory of Protestant triumphalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to how its characters do — or do not — respond to the play’s many crises of conscience. This essay sets Middleton’s tragedy against English Protestant understandings of the trembling body and vexed conscience. It demonstrates that while the play’s multiple instances of trembling seem to unsettle its Protestant triumphalism, its special effects, intended to provoke audience trembling, might nevertheless deepen playgoers’ attachment to the Protestant cause.

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Feudal Law and the Unionist Writings of Thomas Craig

Amidst the flood of unionist literature that followed the accession of James VI to the throne of England, Thomas Craig's De unione regnorum Britanniae stands out as the largest, at around 95,000 words, and the most sophisticated in terms of its argumentation. This article examines Craig's argumentation in detail and shows that he understood British history as a repeating cycle of internecine conflicts between the peoples of Britain followed by invasion and conquest by continental powers. For Craig, the existential threat to Britain was Spain, the dominant Catholic power of the day. While negotiations for an end to the long war between England and Spain were contemporaneous with union negotiations, the De unione can still be seen as a warning about the ongoing dangers of disunity among British Protestants. It is shown that Craig's solution to the lingering historical antagonism between England and Scotland and the unwillingness on either side to compromise their fundamental national identity lay in an idealised version of the feudal-legal relationship as the foundation for the union.