Vol. 6 No. 7 · 19 April 1984
pages 14-16 | 3832 words
Puritan Neuroses
Blair Worden
- The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England by J.T. Cliffe
Routledge, 313 pp, £18.95, March 1984, ISBN 0 7102 0007 2
- The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County by William Hunt
Harvard, 365 pp, £30.60, April 1983, ISBN 0 674 73903 5
- Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism by Patrick Collinson
Hambledon, 604 pp, £24.00, July 1982, ISBN 0 907628 15 X
- Laud’s Laboratory: The Diocese of Bath and Wells in the Early 17th Century by Margaret Steig
Associated University Presses, 416 pp, £30.00, September 1983, ISBN 0 8387 5019 2
- The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression by Patricia Caldwell
Cambridge, 210 pp, £17.50, December 1983, ISBN 0 521 25460 4
- Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford by C.M. Dent
Oxford, 262 pp, £17.50, June 1983, ISBN 0 19 826723 1
If the directions taken by historical research are indicative of a nation’s broader preoccupations, then we may have to prepare ourselves for a religious revival of some magnitude. Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s useful and unpretentious book on the pre-Civil War rulers of England’s shires is entitled, not (as one would have expected a decade or two ago) The Rising Gentry or The Provincial Gentry, but The Puritan Gentry. His theme is not estate management, or local government, but the strenuous spiritual self-examination which, together with the belief in providence and the fear of Catholics, is now guaranteed a central place in any reputable account of the origins of the ‘Puritan Revolution’; and high time too. William Hunt, whose book is ostensibly about pre-Civil War Essex but really about many things besides, calls it The Puritan Moment.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 11 · 21 June 1984
From William Hunt
SIR: I have no quarrel with Blair Worden’s assessment of my book The Puritan Moment as ‘honourably flawed’ (LRB, Vol. 6, No 7), especially since he found it ‘enjoyably provocative’. But his claim that ‘Puritanism was not a social religion’ would have startled those numerous contemporaries who vilified the godly as ‘busy controllers’, and who danced for joy at the Restoration, around resurrected Maypoles. Puritans expected such hostility, and recorded the gibes and insults of the ‘profane multitude’ with vengeful relish. For instance:
Those who are so precise
that they will have no Christmas pies,
it were good the crows
should pluck out their eyes.
Sir Toby Belch would have cried Amen.
I not only agree with Mr Worden that the Puritans’ ‘primary aim’ was to save souls, I said it myself. But there are many ways to save a soul, with diverse implications for life on earth. The social thrust of Puritan ‘vocationalism’, for example, is rather different from that of Franciscan mendicancy. Worden implies that to recognise the autonomy of religion is to abandon social interpretation. Perhaps our dispute is merely verbal, but I think it worth insisting that human action is not less ‘social’ for being governed by supra-rational premises and directed toward apocalyptic ends. Consider Khomeini. (Or Ronald Reagan.)
‘Just how was it,’ Mr Worden asks, ‘that Puritan ministers, who for decades had threatened sinners with hell-fire, were able to rally and direct the looting mobs of drunken weavers?’ I wondered about that too, which is why I wrote the book. I concluded, or so I thought, that there was something fortuitous, after all, about my ‘Puritan Moment’. It resulted from the conjuncture of temporal disasters – natural, economic and military – with obnoxious innovations in religion and politics, which smacked of apostasy from the Protestant national myth. Providentialist doctrine enabled the Puritan preachers to convince a disparate body of people, including weavers both drunk and sober, that Catholics and Laudians, by provoking God’s wrath, were to blame for everything. This is not to deny that there were urgent secular objections to royal policy: merely to question whether purely secular grievances could alone have fired a Great Rebellion. A religion that thus helps to bring down a monarchy is quite ‘social’ enough for me. Incidentally, readers eager to be enjoyably provoked but reluctant to pay £30.60 for the pleasures of a Moment may note that the hardcover edition is out of print anyway. The paperback will appear shortly.
William Hunt
St Lawrence University, Canton, New York
Blair Worden writes: It is absurd of Mr Hunt to attribute to me a ‘claim that “Puritanism was not a social religion.” ’ I hope he has not so shamelessly ignored the contexts of the passages from historical documents which he quotes in his book.
