English Protestant Research Articles

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 by Peter N. Jordan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 218 pages. Hardcover; $99.95. ISBN: 9781009211987. *How should religious conviction shape scientific thought? This is the question many early moderns asked themselves, and which Peter Jordan explores in his book. In a close analysis of prominent early modern English theologians and scientists, Jordan weaves together a coherent intellectual outlook that provides important commentary on the relationship between science and religion. *Jordan's selection of early modern Protestantism will not be new to those interested in the relationship between science and religion. Jordan's PhD advisor, Peter Harrison, who oversaw the dissertation from which this book developed, has left his mark on this topic for the last three decades in books such as The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007), as well as The Territories of Science and Religion (2015). As a consequence Jordan's guiding assumption, that Christian thought created a context within which early modern science was explained, is not anything novel. What is unique is his recognition that early modern theology was not entirely static or homogenous in its relationship to science. By focusing on shifting ideas of the Christian doctrine of providence, what Jordan highlights is the way in which certain thinkers accommodated the doctrine of providence to embrace new scientific developments, such as mechanism and atomism. As a result, this work reminds us that the area of early modern science and religion, while well studied, still has areas of investigation that may bear important fruit. *The book itself, which contains an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters, is organized into four parts. The first part introduces his analytical term of "providential naturalism," by which he means a perspective on the natural world that integrates Christian commitments to providence and explanations of the natural world. It is because he is analyzing the doctrine of providence that his selection of English Protestants makes sense. As he explains in chapter two, English Protestants developed a well-structured formulation of providence, which explained the wide variety of ways in which God acted within the world, activities which could contain--though were not entirely constrained by--the natural world. The important implication of this, which Jordan explores later in the work, is that the newer developments of science, which did not fit the expected patterns of Aristotelianism, and hence of the expectations of how the natural world should function, could nevertheless find an articulation within a world that was believed to be fundamentally controlled and shaped by God. *The second part provides important contextualization for the development of the theories of providence. In a work looking to interrelate theology and science, this section is particularly interesting because it serves as a reminder that the doctrine of providence itself was influenced by unanticipated aspects. The topics he addresses here are chance-based games, such as dice and lots, as well as prodigies. Both games and prodigies provided frequent opportunities for early moderns to develop their definitions of providence. Games of chance became popular in the early modern period; they raised all sorts of questions about how providence related to the natural world, and whether all outcomes, including games of chance, were necessarily providential. *Similar questions about the boundaries of providence show up in John Spencer's thoughts on prodigies, which Jordan analyzes in chapter four. Spencer, a clergyman at the University of Cambridge, became quite critical of the large number of prodigies that were believed to occur on a routine basis within the world. In Spencer's estimation, while it is indeed the case that nature communicates the will of God, the supernatural existence of prodigies occurs less frequently than many of his contemporaries assumed. As a consequence Spencer, who assumes that God maintains an ordered universe, is slow to ascribe divine inspiration to prodigies; instead, he looks toward ways in which presumed prodigies could be interpreted with natural explanations. *The third part applies the question of providence to some of the more prominent new developments within science--that of atomism and theories of the earth. As he notes, oftentimes these new scientific developments are heralded as a shift toward a mechanistic and deterministic cosmos. What Jordan contends, however, is that this was not necessarily the case. For instance, with regard to atomism, Jordan analyzes the Epicurean Walter Charleton and shows how Charleton simultaneously upheld atomism and God's providence. Among many important points, Jordan highlights Charleton's view that God providentially moved atoms in creation to establish an order to the universe which operated according to the patterns that God desired. The task of the natural philosopher, then, was to interpret God's ordered universe. A similar emphasis of establishing God's providence in the created order is noticeable in Thomas Burnet's explanation of creation, in which Burnet minimizes the miraculous nature of creation, opting instead to emphasize the providential foresight which God had from the beginning. *In the final part Jordan offers his conclusions. It is here that one clearly recognizes the merit of Jordan's work, as he articulates a significance for the study that locates it not merely within the world of the seventeenth century, but also today. For, as he explains, the explanations of providential naturalism that he analyzed in the early modern period challenge contemporary notions that science and religion exist as two distinct subjects. Instead, as his book argues, naturalistic explanations flow from an understanding of providence, which depends on who God is and how God maintains the world. As a result, this book will prove useful not merely to specialists in the history of early modern science and religion, but also to those interested in the same questions today. *In a book of such merits, and there are many, it is worth noting one important limitation: the scope of the study. As mentioned above, the question of providence and science proves particularly interesting among English Protestants on account of the importance of the doctrine of providence for this religious group. Yet, the world of early modern science and religion was diverse, and it is important to remember that this book provides a window into only one part of this world, but by no means the entirety of it. So, while the topic of providence proved influential in early modern England, it should be remembered that this line of thought does not necessarily represent all early modern thinking on the topic of science and religion. As a consequence, it is hoped that future research will pursue Jordan's framework across geographical and denominational divides to determine the degree to which his general thesis might be extended even beyond early modern England. *Reviewed by Brent Purkaple, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401.

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 Edmundo Rodríguez Ordóñez was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1940 and died in Los Angeles, California, on June 27, 2022. An elegant man of impeccable dress, the look and manners of a Spanish caballero, and great precision in speech, don Jaime was a figure to be reckoned with in any group because of his quiet assertion of his views and his vast knowledge of his chosen field.His father was Colonel Luis A. Rodríguez Sandoval, a military reformer who after graduating from Ecuador's military academy helped found its air corps. Colonel Rodríguez then had served as commander of the Ecuadorean Border Security Command during the 1941 war between Ecuador and Peru. He went on to write a well-respected analysis of that conflict, serve on the High Court of Military Justice, and dedicate his later years to helping organize the army's archives to further Ecuadorean military research. Jaime Rodríguez's mother was María Beatriz Ordóñez Córdova.At age eight, Jaime's mother moved with him to the United States, where they resided first in New Orleans, Louisiana, and then in Houston, Texas. After attending school in Texas and a stint in the US Army between 1959 and 1962, part of which he served as a medic in Germany, Rodríguez took advantage of the GI Bill. He first attended the University of Houston, earning a BA in economics in 1965 and an MA in history the following year. He then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where in 1970 he completed his PhD under the direction of Nettie Lee Benson, a maestra he revered and who strongly influenced the direction of his research. In Austin he met his future wife, the historian Linda Alexander Rodríguez, a well-published scholar of Ecuadorean and Mexican political and economic history who went on to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, until her retirement in 2003. She died shortly before Jaime.Jaime Rodríguez earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the role of the peripatetic, picaresque Ecuadorean statesman Vicente Rocafuerte (1783–1847) in the early republican history of his native Ecuador and of Mexico. Part biography and part political history, the dissertation traced Rocafuerte's career into the presidency of his native Ecuador and his prominent role in the creation of that country's liberal 1835 constitution. This study would become Jaime's first book, The Emergence of Spanish America: Vicente Rocafuerte and Spanish Americanism, 1808–1832 (University of California Press, 1975). The book laid down the general lines of his extensive future research and publications on what he came to call the “Hispanic revolution,” Spanish American independence movements, and state building in the early nineteenth century.Around the time of completing his doctorate, Jaime Rodríguez moved to California, where he resided the rest of his life in Los Angeles with wife Linda. From 1969 to 1973 he taught Latin American history at California State University, Long Beach, where he met lifelong friend and colleague Bill Sater, and then moved to the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he spent the rest of his career in the History Department and in various administrative positions, with guest-teaching stints along the way in Ecuador, Mexico, and France. Rodríguez made important contributions to the young UCI in his years as assistant dean for undergraduate studies (1979–80), dean of graduate studies and research (1980–86), director of the Mexico/Chicano Program (1984–92), and one of the founders and the first director of the Latin American Studies Program (1984–91), a role that he later resumed. He also directed numerous dissertations. He enjoyed a long career replete with institutional service and professional recognition. Among the many fellowships and grants he garnered were a University of California Regents' Faculty Fellowship; Mellon, Fulbright, and UC President's Faculty Research fellowships; and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. Honors included the Hubert Herring Memorial Award (1980), the Distinguished Faculty Research Lectureship at Irvine (1980), and corresponding membership in Ecuador's and Mexico's national academies of history.Rodríguez was no less dedicated to academic entrepreneurship than to scholarship, having procured federal and state funding for Latin American studies and organized numerous international symposia at UCI chiefly dealing with the processes of independence and early state building in Spanish America, which produced many edited volumes. Of his own prodigious scholarly production, he published scores of articles, several of them quite influential, and two significant overview volumes: one on colonial Mexico coauthored with Colin MacLachlan, The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 1980); and The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 1998).Although Rodríguez framed much of his work against a broad Latin American background, his research and writing, with a few notable exceptions, concentrated on Mexico and Ecuador, where his work was highly influential among scholars of the period. In the words of one of his doctoral students, Rodríguez's writings prompted many historians outside the United States “to readjust their nationalist views that highlighted only the anticolonial elements of the independence processes.” On the other hand, to Anglophone historians, sometimes hemmed in by lack of linguistic ease in Spanish, Rodríguez insisted that the work of Latin American scholars be respected on its own grounds, and he sometimes criticized US historians for not incorporating enough of the findings of Mexican, Ecuadorean, or Spanish researchers in their own work.Jaime was extremely active in California as a cofounder (in 1982) and longtime editor of the well-respected interdisciplinary journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. This bilingual journal, with a dual-national editorial board, was financed by the University of California Consortium for Mexico and the United States and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. This project required enormous time commitments and academic statesmanship from him, which he gave generously for several decades. The journal reflected his esteemed international standing not only in the United States and Mexico but also in South America and Europe, especially in Spain, England, and France. He sat on nine editorial boards and advisory committees for journals in the United States, Ecuador, Mexico, and Spain and gave dozens of lectures at prestigious universities in North and South America and Europe as well as at international conferences. Indicative of the strongly international character of his professional network were the rich personal and collaborative relationships he maintained over many years with scholars such as Christon Archer, Virginia Guedea, and Manuel Chust (respectively from Canada, Mexico, and Spain), among many others.One of Jaime's main scholarly concerns involved broader questions of Latin American identity, state building, and representative governance at the time of the struggle for independence and during the first decades of independent nationhood. He developed the well-known if controversial thesis that the independence of Spanish America was less the result of an anticolonial struggle (although that element was also present) than a consequence of a great political revolution that culminated in the dissolution of a worldwide empire. He contested the Black Legend of Spanish colonialism, a widely accepted conventional interpretation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that embraced the earlier propaganda of Dutch and English Protestants who denounced the Catholic Spanish empire for supposedly encouraging abuse of African slaves and for harsh treatment of Indigenous American peoples.Rodríguez, on the other hand, stressed the rule of law and constitutionalism within the empire, and the Spanish crown's willingness to grant local autonomy to Indigenous subjects. He took a positive view of late Spanish colonial institutions and of early Spanish American independence, seeing them as aligned with a strain of liberalism that first emerged in eighteenth-century Spain, crystallized in the Spanish Constitution of 1812, and then was embraced by some of the former American subjects. He underlined the point that the subjects in the Americas were not colonial but rather coequal members of the Spanish reino (kingdom). This was particularly true after Napoleon's troops invaded Spain in 1808 and usurped the Spanish crown, prompting opponents of French rule to establish local juntas on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas. The juntas sought political autonomy while remaining loyal to the Spanish king—Ferdinand VII, then under house arrest in France. According to Rodríguez, in the face of the reactionary and absolutist tendencies of King Ferdinand and many of his ministers, Spanish rule, driven by the deliberations of many liberal Old and New World deputies in the pan-imperial cortes (legislatures) from 1810, turned increasingly progressive, no longer the antiquated autocratic structure its contemporary enemies and later historians contended.These and other themes were elaborated in Rodríguez's magnum opus, published by Stanford University Press in 2012, “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824, a much-slimmed version of the earlier work in Spanish.1“We Are Now the True Spaniards” was praised in the American Historical Review and other academic venues as particularly well researched (and crisply written, one might add) and as embodying a radical revision of the period. Rodríguez remarked to one of the authors of this essay that he was less interested in the Mexican insurgency of 1810–21 as such, which nonetheless came to occupy a large chunk of this long book, than in that long decade as both a turbulent continuation of European Spain's and the empire's political transformation and as a prolegomenon to the codification of Mexican liberalism, federalism, and state building in the Constitution of 1824. He saw the study, in other words, as an enormous brush clearing for discussion of the political forces at play in the early Mexican republic, a project he had first begun in 1986 but had put aside, saying as much in his preface (p. xiii). The book's chapter on the Federal Republic, as it turned out, was almost a coda to the main work but can also be seen as the tail wagging the dog. The structure of the book clearly shows that the author's interest was drawn more to the political processes leading up to 1810 and away from 1821. This is of a piece with his major thesis that the entire Spanish empire is the unit to observe between 1808 and 1824, not just Father Miguel Hidalgo's rebellion and its sequelae, which he sees as almost peripheral to the large political struggles of the era. Rodríguez interprets calls for “independence” among novohispanos (inhabitants of New Spain), up to and including the brief but spectacular rise of Agustín de Iturbide, as focusing on home rule or greater autonomy within a restructured Spanish empire rather than absolute political separation from Spain. He thus views the Plan de Iguala of 1821, for example, as a project of compromise that would have allowed New Spain to remain within the universal Spanish monarchy but in a position of much greater autonomy.One of the most interesting sections of the book is chapter 3, on the elections of 1809 in New Spain to select deputies for the Cortes de Cádiz that met the following year and produced the 1812 Constitution. Through a punctilious examination of the election results, a colony-wide poll (Rodríguez himself would have eschewed the term colony) neglected by most previous scholars, he came to estimate that as many as a million novohispanos voted, and would do so again in the elections of 1812 mandated by the Spanish Constitution; or in other words, that male novohispanos took very seriously their newly acquired political rights, first as subjects, then as citizens. He was at pains to demonstrate throughout this formidable book the continuities between events in Europe and those in the New World and thus could honorably don the label Atlanticist, which he probably would have embraced wholeheartedly. He also traced the character of the 1824 Mexican federal charter to the 1812 Spanish one, leaving aside the influences so often claimed for the French revolutionary constitution of 1793 or the US Constitution.Jaime Rodríguez O.'s original scholarship and keen analysis caused many historians and citizens of Latin America and the wider Hispanic world to reevaluate their past and its impact on the future. As a historian, a teacher, and an academic entrepreneur, his influence will long be felt. As a friend, he will be much missed.We thank Alberto Barrera Enderle, William Sater, and Ernesto E. Bassi for their collaboration in writing this appreciation.

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.

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

The author of Nibble the Squirrel is dead. John Elliott's first book, somewhat in the anthropomorphic tradition of Beatrix Potter, appeared when he was barely 16 years old, in 1946. The illustrator was his school friend, Julian Slade, who later achieved fame as the composer of Salad Days. John used to joke that Nibble earned him more money than all his academic books put together. On the surface, at least, it hardly betokened his future greatness as a historian of what he called “Spain and its world”; but neither did hardly anything in his life up to that time.His father, who was employed as headmaster of a small private school in Surrey, had entered him for a King's Scholarship at Eton College, much as he might have with any exceptionally gifted boy. So began John's life in a series of academic hothouses: the scholars' house at Eton, where he shared a roof with some six dozen of the cleverest boys in the British Empire; Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate scholar, frequent prizewinner, research fellow, and, for five years from 1962, university lecturer; King's College London, as a professor from 1968 to 1973; then the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, NJ; and finally the University of Oxford, where he was Regius Professor of Modern History—perhaps the most coveted history chair in the world—from 1990 until his retirement in 1997.Early proclivities did not include any special vocation or aptitude for Spanish studies. Quakerism, no longer formally upheld when John was a child, informed his family's values. Though he came, like William Christian Jr., to embody, as it were, John Bossy's theory of the affinities or mutual sympathy of Catholicism and the tradition of the Society of Friends, he shared—and always evinced—the characteristic qualities of radical English Protestantism: austerity, sobriety, an abhorrence of ostentation, a quiet and unassuming manner, and an unremitting work ethic. On one of John's early visits to Oxford in 1971, to speak to the Stubbs Society, the society's president (by convention, always an undergraduate), acting on common assumptions about Hispanists' tastes, jeopardized the society's finances by ordering the finest wines, only to find that his guest was a total abstainer who would do nothing but modestly sip lemonade.By his own admission John took no interest in Spain until he capriciously joined fellow undergraduates on a tour of Iberia by truck in 1950. Spain captivated him, partly because he perceived what eludes many superficial observers—that Castilian traditional virtues resembled his own—and partly because he warmed to the way that austerity and poverty were no impediment to Spaniards' enjoyment of life. His artistic sensibility—which has eluded most of his obituarists but which was part of the basis of his friendship with Julian Slade—clinched his desire to study the country, especially after a visit to the Prado, where Diego Velázquez's portrait of the conde-duque de Olivares on a rearing stallion focused the young man's attention on a research topic that would occupy many years of his life. This visit led to a biography, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (1986), that is by universal acclaim one of the masterpieces of modern Spanish historiography.Meanwhile, however, he needed a more manageable project for a doctoral dissertation. There was no suitable supervisor in Cambridge, but he worked under Sir Herbert Butterfield, who, though a notoriously unexigent master, taught him to refrain from moral judgments, to dispense with the delusions of hindsight, and to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen. John settled on the elucidation of one of the most dramatic episodes in Olivares's life, the Catalan revolt of 1640. By dint of great efforts, he learned both Spanish and Catalan, which he spoke with unerring accuracy and into which he would weave amusingly idiomatic phrases. He read the Spanish literature of his period and never hesitated to use literature and art as evidence, but he always insisted that he was a historian and not, strictly speaking, a Hispanist.Like all his subsequent work, the dissertation, published in 1963, demonstrated uncompromising mastery of the sources and attracted attention in Spain for two qualities that he brought to the subject: objectivity, unusual in a region that the Spanish Civil War divided and centralist hostility to Catalanism embittered; and an ability to set Spain in the only context that makes its history intelligible—that of the Europe of which Spain forms part and whose history Spain has shared in every aspect. He was among a stunning generation of foreigners—including two other Englishmen, Raymond Carr and Hugh Thomas, and an American, Stanley Payne—who helped dismantle the myth of a viscerally peculiar culture, warped out of a European trajectory by supposedly Africanizing, Orientalizing, or dogmatically crusading experiences. Contextualization and comparison were always key elements of his technique—he abjured talk of methodology, as of every hierophantic term—especially manifest in Richelieu and Olivares (1984) and Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (2006). By classifying Spain as a composite monarchy he helped to convince Spaniards that their history could be, simultaneously, both distinctive and representative in Europe. His fairness and common sense in the handling of political controversy attracted admiration from every side in Spanish politics and scholarship and made him a sort of adoptive son of the country, garbed in numerous honorary academic robes and encumbered with civil decorations and honors. He uttered judgments only when asked, making clear, for instance, that he was staunchly in favor of cultural Catalanism and political devolution yet unwavering in approval of the continued political unity of Spain. He predicted accurately that the movement for historical memory in the early twenty-first century would be of less service to truth than to conflictive and imprudent political agendas.To the study of subjects shared by readers of HAHR he brought his characteristic freshness of vision, first by treating the Spanish monarchy as a global phenomenon in his textbook, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (1963). It appeared almost simultaneously with the first volume of Spain under the Habsburgs (1964) by John Lynch, who was also an impeccable scholar and might have had an advantage as a devout Catholic but whose work did not quite match his rival's fluency and flair. In, among other works, a 1966 paper to the Royal Historical Society titled “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés” and in lectures on “the uncertain impact” of America on Europe, published in 1970 as The Old World and the New, 1492–1650, John Elliott demonstrated how traditional, meticulous reading of documentary evidence with a humanistic eye could add to understanding, even of familiar texts. The new approach to which he became increasingly sympathetic was that of court studies, brilliantly represented in his joint work with Jonathan Brown, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (1980). Nonetheless, he never abandoned the standard but perhaps insufficiently nuanced view of the Spanish monarchy as a precociously bureaucratic state, whereas he might have made more allowance for its courtly, paternalistic, patrimonial, seigneurial, and traditional layers of government. He might be criticized for lack of responsiveness to regional studies and a consequent tendency to overgeneralize on, for instance, the problem of how and why the Spanish monarchy endured for so long. He was also rather selective in taking environmental history into account. Yet one of his great virtues was his modesty; he always remained open to advice, grateful for correction, and alert to other people's ideas. Above all, the author of Nibble the Squirrel had a gift of imagination that a great historian needs: imagination, disciplined by evidence, was essential, he always maintained, both for dialogue amid differences of opinion and for those conversations with the dead that historians conduct in their minds as they interrogate the sources.His character was exemplary: always generous, courteous, painstakingly helpful, incapable of wrath or resentment, and slow to make adverse judgments of others. He was kind even in criticism. He had that gift that an English education, at its best, imparts: he could be devastating without causing offense. At Oxford, he had the reputation of asking penetrating questions at soirees and seminars, leaving speakers flattened yet somehow flattered. His pupils benefited, as the tally of their achievements shows: in the history of the Spanish world, a disproportionate number of leading historians of the next generation studied with him or gained from his informal mentoring. He was a demanding director of research, never accepting any excuse for laggardness or inattention to detail, but always a sagacious and encouraging influence. He coaxed students into renouncing jargon, writing well, and working toward books for publication, not merely theses for examination.He had neither time nor taste for academic politics. He left Princeton for Oxford with profound misgivings, knowing that he was exchanging what he called an academic paradise for an Eden full of human serpents. He had already turned down the offer of the Regius Chair at Cambridge. But he could not refuse a further call to a post that he had not sought but that came to him as a duty he felt he had to fulfill (recognized as such by the award of a knighthood of the United Kingdom, to go with his two Spanish knighthoods, in 1994). And Oxford proved, in practice, a congenial place, highly adapted for teaching and learning. There (until his death in hospital of a chest infection with contributory heart failure on March 10, 2022) he spent a happy and fruitful retirement in his charming and welcoming old stone house in Iffley, in the company of his wife, Oonah, with whom he shared 64 years of marriage and by whom, with his sister, Judith, he is survived.

A ‘Fiction of the Mind’: Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England

Abstract This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period.

‘Having drunk heresy with their (mother’s) milk’: English Protestant converts to Catholicism in Malta, 1600–1798

This article analyses the conversion of 379 English Protestants to Catholicism in Malta between 1600 and 1798. It explores the motivations behind their recantation, the agents of their conversion and the role of dissimulation in discarding their Protestant faith. It ends with two remarks. First, people in the Mediterranean ‘knew no religious frontiers’.1 Malta, like other Mediterranean territories was a place with a mixed religious profile. Second, though English Protestants considered themselves to be the ‘elect’ and their country the new Israel, the two faiths were not mutually exclusive and could find common ground over the defence of Christendom.