Abstract
The analysis of literature in relation to the cultural history of the emotions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is at the cutting edge of literary scholarship in early modern studies. Recent works of historical and literary scholarship in this area have tended mainly to emphasise the medico-scientific aspects of emotion and affective piety. Such works demonstrate an advanced awareness of early modern melancholy and depression, fear, anxiety and hope, and draw upon relevant medical and scientific knowledge from the period.1 Less attention has been paid to date regarding the literature of religious nonconformity and emotions in the mid- to late seventeenth century, particularly in relation to positive emotions such as pleasure, hope and joy.2 Writers and their works, it is argued in this chapter, are often motivated more by political and religious anxiety than medical illness. Psychological and even physical ill health may be symptoms of the political and religious context. The argument posited here draws out the relationship between public life and private feeling in selected works by Richard Baxter and John Bunyan. Their anxieties and fears concerning salvation and election, the politics of prayer, reason, enthusiasm and hope, from the 1640s onwards, are palpable in their written work and in their actions. Both wrote freely on religious matters throughout their professional lives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997);
Gail Paster Kern, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004);
Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (eds), Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013);
Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006);
M. Heyd, ‘Robert Burton’s Sources on Enthusiasm and Melancholy: From a Religious Tradition to Religious Controversy’, History of European Ideas, 5(1) (1984), 17–44;
Mary Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge University Press, 2010);
S. Bryn Roberts, Puritanism and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Ministry and Theology of Ralph Venning c.1621–1674 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015);
Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2007);
J.F. Sena, ‘Melancholic Madness and the Puritans’, Harvard Theological Review, 66(3) (1973): 293–309.
John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1660–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 314.
Calendar of State Papers Venetian 1617–19, 387, cited by Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7.
On conforming puritans in the early modern period, see Marcus K. Harmes, Bishops and Power in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2013);
Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud (London: Associated University Presses, 1997).
N.H. Keeble, ‘Richard Baxter’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004–11). Hereinafter ODNB.
See the General Introduction by Allan Ingram and Leigh Weatherall Dickson (eds), Depression and Melancholy, 1660–1800 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 4 vols, and the Introduction to vol. 1, Religious Writings, ed. David Walker and Anita O’Connell, xxiii–xxxvii.
For an overview, see Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford University Press, 2014);
Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Richard Baxter, God’s Goodness Vindicated (1671: Wing B1278), 3; Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696: Wing B1370), I, 7. See also N.H. Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford University Press, 1982), 32.
Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. Lynch is drawing in particular on Perkins’ Armilla Aurea (1590: STC 19655), translated into English as The Golden Chain (1591: STC 19660).
Benjamin Whichcote, ‘Moral and Religious Aphorisms’ in C.A. Patrides (ed.), The Cambridge Platonists (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 330; Walker and O’Connell (eds), Religious Writings, xxx–xxxiii.
Mark Knights, ‘How Rational was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’ in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2007), 252–67, at 252.
John Locke, ‘Religion’ (1681), in Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 278–80, at 279. See also ‘Reason, Passion, Superstition’ (1681), 280–82.
Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2001), 102;
Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Yolton (ed.) (London; Dent; abridged edn, 1993), 4.18.1.
See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton University Press, 1986), Chapter 3, passim.
Samuel C. Pearson, Jr., ‘The Religion of John Locke and the Character of His Thought’ in Richard Ashcraft (ed.), John Locke: Critical Assessments, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 1991), I, 133–50, at 133, 134.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Richard Tuck (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Part 4, 417–82;
Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Jonathan Israel (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2007). For an in-depth discussion, see James, Passion and Action, 124–56.
Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford University Press, 2002), 41. On Bunyan’s creative strategies, Calvinist soteriology and despair, see
Stuart Sim, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). On Bunyan’s doctrine as ‘accommodating and consoling’, see
Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002); for a nuanced reading of Bunyan and melancholy, see
Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006).
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Roger Sharrock (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1962), 49–50. All further references are to this edition. See also
Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 252; Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 50; Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming, 205.
N.H. Keeble (ed.) The Autobiography of Richard Baxter (London: Everyman, 1974, abridged; revised edn, 1985), xxviii.
See Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), Chapter 8, passim.
Keeble, Autobiography of Richard Baxter, 56. On the importance of Edwards and Gangraena to the taxonomy of sects, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Richard Baxter, Aphorismes of Justification; (1649: Wing B1185), appendix, 163; cited in Tim Cooper, Fear and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 91. See Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters, 4, 15–16, 70.
Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978), 109 .
W.C. Abbott (ed.), Writing and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), I, 360; cited in
N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 14.
John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 148. See also
Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford University Press, 2012), Chapter 3.
William Lamont (ed.), Baxter: A Holy Commonwealth (Cambridge University Press, 1994), x, xv.
For a comprehensive analysis of nonconformist plotting against the state in the period, see the following trilogy by Richard L. Greaves: Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford University Press, 1986); Enemies under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford University Press, 1990); and Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford University Press, 1992).
Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford University Press, 1989), 198–9. Greaves dates the composition to 1668–71 in Glimpses of Glory, 638.
H.G. Tibbutt (ed.), The Minutes of the First Independent Church (Now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford, 1656–1766, Publications of the Bedford Historical Society, 55 (1976), 63–5; cited in Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 287.
For a useful survey and analysis of Bunyan’s ambiguity politically, see Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2008), 205–12.
N.H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 133.
Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford University Press, 2011), xliii.
Beth Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 52.
For a particularly rigorous reading of Bunyan and the market, see David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (London: Palgrave, 2001), Chapter 9, passim.
Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012), 2, 7.
Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch (eds), The English Bible: the King James Version (New York: Norton, 2012), Headnote to The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 570.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 David Walker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Walker, D. (2016). Piety and the Politics of Anxiety in Nonconformist Writing of the Later Stuart Period. In: Ryrie, A., Schwanda, T. (eds) Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69655-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49098-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)