"Mony Choaks": The quaker critique of the seventeenth-century public sphere

Modern Philology

Volumn 98, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 251-269

  Hazelton, Meiling ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746541105     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/492963     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 231-58, quotes on pp. 231-32.
2. Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 13-14.
3. A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647-49) from the Clarke Manuscripts (London, 1986), p. 57.
4. Barthes, p. 17.
5. See Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, N.J., 1994), esp. her "Introduction" and "Revolution in Print: Lilbume's Jury, Areopagitica, and the Conscientious Public."
6. See also David Norbrook, "Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere," in The Administration of Aesthetics, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 3-33;
7. and Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), pp. 26-32.
8. Achinstein, p. 72.
9. Nigel Smith, "Naked Space: Cultural Boundaries in the Leveller Republic" (paper presented at the sixth Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 3, 1996).
10. Smith draws on Kate Peters, "Quaker Pamphleteering and the Development of the Quaker Movement, 1652-1660" (doctoral diss., Cambridge University, 1996).
11. See, e.g., Richard Bauman, "Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Quaker Rhetoric," Quarterly foumal of Speech 56 (1970): 67-74
12. Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge, 1983);
13. and Hugh OrmsbyLennon, "From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speechways during the Puritan Revolution," in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Oxford, 1991), pp. 72-112.
14. Nigel Smith, "Hidden Things Brought to Light: Enthusiasm and Quaker Discourse," in The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (Portland, Oreg., 1995), p. 58.
15. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 42-43.
16. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 16.
17. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (1643-48), ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, Conn., 1959), pp. 535, 570.
18. See Alan Craig Houston,"'A Way of Settlement': The Levellers, Monopolies and the Public Interest," History of Political Thought 14 (1993): 381-420, quotes on 386.
19. Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 36.
20. Richard Overton, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (1645), in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638-1647, ed. William Haller, 3 vols. (New York, 1933-34), 3, part 2:207.
21. Overton, in Haller, ed., 3, part 2:211-12.
22. See Kevin Dunn, "Milton among the Monopolists: Areopagitica, Intellectual Property and the Hartlib Circle," in Samuel Harilib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 177-92, esp. pp. 181-86;
23. and Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J., 1978), pp. 99-128, 158-98.
24. George Fox, A Paper Sent Forth into the World (London, 1654), p. 4.
25. John Lilburne, Englands Birth-Rightfustified (1645), in Haller, ed., 2:8.
26. Richard Overton, quoted in Houston, p. 388.
27. Francis Bacon, Novum Organon (1620), in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74), 4:54-55.
28. Christopher Hill, "Quakers and the English Revolution," Journal of the Friends' Historical Society 56 (1992): 171-72.
29. George Fox, To the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England. Fifty Nine Particulars (London, 1659), p. 5.
30. Edward Burrough, quoted in Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985), p. 32. Winstanley later became a Quaker, as did Lilburne.
31. For evidence of Winstanley's conversion to Quakerism, see James Alsop, "Gerrard Winstanley's Later Life," Past and Present 82 (1979): 73-81. Lilburne characteristically announced his conversion publicly in a printed confession of faith addressed to his wife.
32. See The Resurrection of John Lilburne, Now a Prisoner in Dover Castle (London, 1656).
33. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, N.Y., 1941), p. 223.
34. George Fox, Newes Comingup out of the North (London, 1653), p. 11.
35. James Nayler, A Discovery of the First Wisdom (London, 1656), p. 33.
36. James Nayler, Truth Cleared from Scandals (London, 1654), p. 22.
37. [Richard Farnworth,] Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth (London, 1656), p. 7. These lines are in the Bodleian mss. 4°L63 (1A) Art.
38. Richard Hubberthome, The Real Cause of the Nations Bondage and Slavery (London, 1659), p. 3.
39. Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church: From Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford, 1956), pp. 304, 298.
40. This figure, of course, has a long history: the gluttonous priest was a stock character in medieval satire and became a favorite object of abuse in the anticlerical literature of the Reformation. In The Araignement of Mr. Persecution, Overton used grotesque images of cannibalistic consumption in his condemnation of the exploitation of the poor by tithe-gathering Presbyterian ministers and gentry (see Nigel Smith, "Richard Overton's Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style," Prose Studies 9 [1986]: 49-51).
41. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was directed primarily against the Ranters but was used to prosecute Quakers and other religious radicals as well. Quakers were generally prosecuted under the first branch of the act, which condemned anyone who "affirmed himself or any other mere creature to be very God, or to be infinite or almighty or equal with God, or that the true God or the eternal Majesty dwelt in the creature and nowhere else" (William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism, 2d ed. [Cambridge, 1955], p. 54).
42. In addition to being silenced in various other ways, Quakers were also often literally gagged in the course of their punishment for "disturbing the peace." On official policy regarding the Quakers and other radical sects in the 1650s, see esp. Blair Worden, "Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate," Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 199-233;
43. and Austin Woolrych, "The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?" History 75 (1990): 207-31.