The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660The English Radical Imagination addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period asignorant and uneducated 'tub preachers'. This representation has become a critical orthodoxy since Christopher Hill's seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Despite the reservations of so-called 'revisionist' historians about the misleading implications of Hill's work, culturalhistorians and literary critics have continued to view radical texts as authentic artefacts of a form of early modern popular culture. This book challenges the divide between 'elite' and 'popular' culture in the seventeenth century. While research has revealed that the rank and file of the more organized radical movements was composed of the lower 'middling sort' of people who had little or no access to the elite intellectualculture of the period, some of the most important and most discussed radical writers had been to university in the 1620s and 1630s. Chapters 1-2 investigate how critics - especially those sympathetic to the radicals - have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists andpublicists of radicalism as 'illiterate Mechanick persons'. The failure to recognize the elite cultural background of these writers has resulted in a failure to acknowledge the range of their intellectual and rhetorical resources and, consequently, in a misrepresentation of the sophistication ofboth their ideas and their writing. Chapters 3-5 are case studies of some of the most important and innovative radical writers. They show how these writers use their experience of an orthodox humanist education for the purposes of satire and ridicule and how they interpret texts associated with orthodox ideologies and culturalpractices to produce heterodox arguments. Radical prose of the English Revolution thus emerges as a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon. |
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Abiezer Coppe academic Anabaptists antinomian argued argument authority Baxter Bible biblical Calvinist Cambridge Christ Christian Christopher Hill Church classical clergy clerical Coppe's Coppin Dippers Dipt discourse dispute Divine Teachings doctrine early modern England elite English Revolution Featley Featley's Fifth Monarchist folly formal Gangraena Greek hath Hebrew heresy heretic History holy human humanist illitteratus inner light intellectual John knowledge language Latin Laurence Clarkson learning Leveller linguistic literary London Marprelate Milton Montaigne Mortalitie Nigel Smith opponents orthodox Overton Oxford pamphlets parody Pedantius persecution polemical political Popkin preacher preaching Presbyterian printed prophetic prose Puritan Quakers Ranters Reader reading reason Reformation Religion religious rhetorical Richard Richard Coppin Richard Overton Robert Rich Rogers Rusticus ad Academicos saints Samuel Fisher satirical scepticism scholar Scripture Second Exercitation sectarian Spirit Sterry Stubbe style Sweet Sips Testimony of Truth textual tion tracts Walwyn William William Walwyn Word World Turned World Turned Upside writings