English Protestant Research Articles

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

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.

Reorienting English Protestantism

This special issue seeks to expand the intellectual landscape of English Protestantism over the course of its long Reformation from the early sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries. England's protracted conflict over its Protestant identity encouraged the diversification of its orientations to sacred texts and religious traditions, stretching it beyond western Europe to the eastern Mediterranean world. The essays examine English Protestant engagement with Hellenic, Hebraic, and Arabic sources and traditions within a wider context than typically explored in existing narratives. They illustrate how English Protestant scholarship reinforced stereotypes, while also prompting self-reflection and inspiring the reconstruction of England's own traditions and cultural assumptions. Expanding English ecclesiastical, theological, exegetical, philological, and cultural interests, the volume calls for a more fluid and “connected history” to understand the full scope of English Reformation thought and its engagement with non-Western churches and traditions.

‘Physicians of the Soul’: Clerical Responses to Demonic Temptation and Possession in Early Modern Reformed English Protestant Theology

Abstract: Recent scholarship has highlighted the centrality of demonic temptation (to commit sin) in early modern Reformed English Protestantism. This article develops this argument further by examining the manifestation of, and the clerical response to, demonic possession in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Demonic possession is framed here as an expression of intense conflict with demonic temptation: a reading that emphasises the spiritual effects of this affliction on the soul. Moreover, it presents English clergymen—particularly those of Puritan convictions—as predominantly concerned with treating the effects of demonic temptation on the soul. In this role, they thereby fashioned themselves as ‘physicians of the soul’. Through examining a range of early modern English works of practical divinity, demonology, and demonic possession, this article establishes the broader ‘Godly’ concern with demonic temptation, along with how this concern shaped their conceptualisation of demonic assault and spiritual healing.

The English Exorcist: John Darrell and the Shaping of Early Modern English Protestant Demonology. Brendan C. Walsh. Routledge Research in Early Modern History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. x + 306 pp. $160.

The English Exorcist: John Darrell and the Shaping of Early Modern English Protestant Demonology. Brendan C. Walsh. Routledge Research in Early Modern History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. x + 306 pp. $160.

Demonic Assault, Providence, and the Search for Salvation in Early Modern Reformed English Protestant Theology

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the height of European demonological interest—England experienced a series of demonic possession cases that gained substantial attention from the clergy and laypeople alike. Reported across sensationalist pamphlets and learned demonological treatises, these cases were presented as extraordinary tokens of God's providence intended to be interpreted and responded to by those involved. English Calvinists during this period were largely interested in demonic possession for three primary reasons: what providential meaning this spiritual affliction offered, what action God was compelling them to carry out, and, more importantly, what profit they could gain in fulfilling their godly duties. The profit cited by these Calvinists was a glimpse into their predestined fate. This article argues that demonic affliction was fashioned as an emblematic phenomenon by English Calvinist communities with dispossession (exorcism) cast as a definitive form of spiritual warfare designed to provide comfort for the faithful and guide them toward a blessed conclusion. In this context, possession functioned as a providential catalyst: a call to carry out dispossession that, once fulfilled, brought the entire act to completion. Examining four possession textual accounts in detail, with a particular focus on the exploits of the controversial Puritan exorcist John Darrell, this article examines the intellectual construction of spirit possession and exorcism within an aligned Calvinist providential and eschatological framework. These cases exemplify many of the prevailing interpretations of spirit possession in the early modern English context and illustrate how this affliction offered individuals a potential salve to the vexed nature of Calvinist predestination.

Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism ed. by Evan Haefeli

Reviewed by: Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism ed. by Evan Haefeli Mitchell Oxford Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism EDITED BY EVAN HAEFELI Early American Histories. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. xvi + 342 pages. Cloth: $39.50. ISBN: 9780813944913. The ideology of anti-popery, as Evan Haefeli rightly observes in the introductory essay to this superb edited volume, was a “pervasive Anglo-American tradition,” which should be distinguished from straightforward anti-Catholic bigotry by its fusion of “hostility to the religious and political example of the Roman Catholic papacy” (12). As such, anti-popery was “inseparable from British and American understandings of liberty and slavery,” he explains, “justifying the hegemony of Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic up through the American Revolution” (3). As Haefeli notes, despite anti-popery’s well-recognized scope and significance, this extensively studied phenomenon is surprisingly “fragmented” along geographical, temporal, and thematic lines (18). Through this excellent collection of essays, Haefeli brings together the rich—yet constellated—scholarship on the varieties of British anti-popery, providing a fuller portrait of this complex phenomenon. Against Popery is thus not only valuable to historians of religion, politics, and culture in the early modern Atlantic, it is also a usefully comprehensive single-volume resource for scholars of the similarly robust—though substantially different—anti-Catholicism of John Henry Newman’s late nineteenth century. Haefeli’s most conspicuous achievement is to bring the sprawling scholarship on early modern anti-Catholicism under one roof. Comprising contributions from twelve scholars (as well as two chapters authored by Haefeli himself), this volume embraces considerable breadth. Its authors lead us on several excursions out from Britain’s imperial metropole to Post-Reformation Scotland, early colonial Virginia, and to the transatlantic “anti-Irish anti-Catholicism” that shaped Britain’s American colonial project (125). But Against Popery does more than that. Its division into three sections, “Foundations,” “Hegemony,” and “Transformations,” which span from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, imparts a unifying coherence—an overarching argument about the emergence, entrenchment, and evolution of this pervasive and pliable ideology—across the volume’s impressive array of topics, times, and places. Indeed, rather than simply an omnibus of the familiar, these essays trod much new interpretive ground as well. Several highlight new sources and methods, such as Laura M. Stevens’s fascinating exploration of the competing evocations of the Virgin Mary by eighteenth-century British Protestants who at once portrayed her as the epitome of “Catholic idolatry and monstrous femininity,” and a “Protestant [End Page 103] exemplar . . . of godly attributes,” (200) or Clare Haynes’s similar study of the “dualistic approach” Anglo-Americans took to “popish art”: they admired its beauty while “denying its ultimate truth” (228). Others offer new perspectives on old questions, like Cynthia van Zandt’s compelling account of how the shocking (and murky) “gunpowder plot” of 1605 “wove anti-popery into the culture of English America,” and to the colony of Virginia in particular—despite the Old Dominion’s longstanding reputation as “hot Protestant” New England’s comparably cooler counterpart. Or Brendan McConville’s “A Deal with the Devil,” which makes a persuasive case—against prevailing historiographic currents—that “anti-popish or Francophobic fears” were a central “driving force” of the American Revolution (287). McConville’s essay is also a lynchpin in Against Popery’s interpretive arc from “hegemony” to “transformation.” Anglo-Protestant anti-popery in Revolutionary America was not a “fixed . . . political-ideological position,” and Patriot leaders applied these powerful political ideas against the British Crown and Parliament, thereby opening space for an alliance with Catholic France (288). Peter Walker’s subsequent chapter traces the contemporaneous “transformation” of the politics of anti-popery in the imperial metropole. In Britain, he contends, that both Catholics and dissenting Protestants gained rights in the early nineteenth century “not because religious prejudice had disappeared,” but because the “languages of anti-popery and anti-puritanism were . . . refashioned as arguments for toleration” (316). As should be clear, Against Popery offers more than an updated accounting of the varieties of British anti-Catholicism. Indeed, an unmistakable thematic thread can be followed across its multiplicity of authorial voices. As Haefeli succinctly puts...

Keeping up with the Catholics: Protestant Evangelism in the Late 17th Century

Abstract James II’s reign opened up space for Catholic mission activity within England. Priests, both foreign and English-born, set up public worship services that were open for visitors to attend. A wave of pamphlets explaining the Roman Catholic faith rolled over the country, and converts were encouraged to publish their stories of leaving Protestantism. Schools were opened, apparently attended by both Catholics and Protestants. And the important pastoral work of invigorating English Catholics, educating them and encouraging them in piety, began. Devout Protestants immediately recognized the efficacy of these missions and admired how quickly they worked. Beginning in the reign of James, they argued that they should also be doing such missional work. This paper looks at what Catholics prioritized in their work in England under James II, and how English Protestants referenced those examples in their own work after 1688.