The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution

Prose Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 1991, Pages 14-44

  Achinstein, Sharon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84963438018     PISSN: 01440357     EISSN: 17439426     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01440359108586444     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), 13. I have modernized original spelling here and throughout the essay. My thanks are to Jules Law, Richard Kroll and Kathy Maus for their helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay. Jim Holstun was especially helpful in his suggestions and comments.
2. John Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (London, 1641), 106.For Wilkins' life, see Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1641–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969);
3. Hans Aarsleff, “John Wilkins,” in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 239–77.
4. Joseph Waite's commendatory poem to Cave Beck's The Universal Character (1657), A6r, in Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 2.
5. As does Hugh Trevor-Roper, in “Three Foreigners,” in Religion, The Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), 237–93, though Trevor-Roper is too quick to align the thinking of Dury, Comenius and Hartlib to the ideology of the purported “country party.”
6. Michel Foucault, in his story of the formation of the “classical episteme” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), was not the only one to write this kind of teleological story; it is a practice of many historians of science and ideas, according to Cohen's critique of such teleological narratives in Sensible Words. There are, of course, many fascinating and excellent accounts of the rise of the universal language schemes of the late seventeenth century in the context of the continental and native philosophic traditions.
7. See, in addition to Cohen, M.M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
8. James Knowlton, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975);
9. and Vivian Salmon, The Study of Language in Seventeenth Century England (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1979).
10. I say “allow,” since the business of policing contextual boundaries is still a powerful one, even within the new historicism. For comparison, see the approach taken by Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, “Politics of Discourse: Introduction,” in their Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–20.
11. Catalogue of the Thomason Tracts in the British Museum, 1640–1661 (London: 1908), xxi. This collection is not complete for the period, but gives some idea of the volume.
12. There have been some attempts to set the projects of seventeenth-century science into the political camps of the English civil wars; Christopher Hill has argued in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 106, 112, for example, that science played a “radical” role in the English Revolution because there is something inherently progressive in scientific inquiry;
13. science was Puritan, according to Robert K. Merton, “Puritanism, Pietism, and Science,” in Science and Ideas, A.B. Arons and A.M. Bork, eds. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964);
14. Trevor-Roper, too, has attempted to assign social positions to the practitioners of the new science in “Three Foreigners,” in Religion, The Reformation, and Social Change, which allies the new science to the “country party.” Charles Webster, on the other hand, has argued that the practice of science was a relief from politics in The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 95–6.
15. Yet the search for the social and political location of seventeenth-century science has too often sought ready-made categories for materials which do not suit them, and our interest here is not in the “politics” of the Universal Language Movement as much as in the ways that linguistic concerns were in the broad sense. Though historians of the Universal Language Movement do assign some weight to the political situation of mid-century Britain in explaining the rise of linguistic theory, they most often do so in unhelpfully vague ways: Murray Cohen attempts to map an epistemological shift onto the sociological, referring to a “change which corresponds to an abandonment of revolutionary fervor, politically and socially,” but does not elaborate, op. cit., 23; Hans Aarsleff opens his biographical account of Wilkins with an allusion to the social setting, but does not go further in elaborating how that social setting might impinge on the life itself, “John Wilkins,” in op. cit., 239;
16. Sidonie Clauss, “John Wilkins' Essay Toward a Real Character: Its Place in the Seventeenth-Century Episteme,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 48:4 (1982), 532.
17. Nigel Smith, ed., A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London: Junction Books, 1983), 31.
18. Christopher Hill, “From Marprelate to the Levellers,” in his Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 75–95;
19. E. Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and her seminal article, “The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance,” Past and Present, 45 (1969), 19–89, have engendered much debate over the deterministic path of print;
20. T. Rabb and E. Eisenstein, “Debate: The Advent of Printing and the Problem of the Renaissance: A Comment,” Past and Present, 52 (1971), 135–44;
21. Anthony T. Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11:2 (1980), 265–86.
22. For the history of the press in the English revolutionary period, see Frederick S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952);
23. J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961);
24. C. Blagden, “The Stationers' Company in the Civil War Period,” The Library, fifth series, 13:1 (1958), 1–17.
25. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
26. Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–84,
27. G.R. Elton, “A High Road to Civil War,” in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Government and Politics, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 164–82,
28. which hold there was no formal “opposition” party, in reaction to the earlier study by Wallace Notestein, “Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons,” British Academy Proceedings, Vol. II (1924–25), 125–75, and, later,
29. C. Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th Century England,” Past and Present, 92 (1981), 100–24,
30. J.H. Hexter, “Historiographical Perspectives: The Early Stuarts and Parliament: Old Hat and Nouvelle Vogue,” Parliamentary History Yearbook, I (1984), 180–205.
31. See also Derek Hirst, “Revisionism Revisited: The Place of Principle,” Past and Present, 92 (1981), 79–99. My meaning of “opposition” here refers to the many souls, some organized into named parties, “The Levellers” for instance, who opposed the King. Of course this lumping together is scandalous in terms of historical accuracy, but for the purposes of my argument about anti-opposition responses to the press, it is fair: those who opposed the opposition saw them as one rebellious lump.
32. Christopher Hill, “Radical Prose in 17th Century England: From Marprelate to the Levellers,” Essays in Criticism, 32:2 (1982), 95–118.
33. John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. II, E. Sirluck, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 557.
34. John Lilburne, England's Birth-Right (1645).
35. Mercurius Pacificus (1648), 2.
36. A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London: J.M. Dent, 1951), 104. We should take care to note that Cromwell's idea about an underlying agreement was of a for his own ends.
37. Henry Peacham, The World is Ruled & Governed by Opinion (1641), Folger P949.5. Special thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library for their permission to publish this material.
38. Natalie Davis, “Women on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 124–51, explains how this kind of sexual symbolism is connected with issues of power, order and hierarchy in early modern Europe.
39. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, Peter Laslett, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 283.
40. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure for discussion of varous “Adamic” theories of linguistic origin, where “the relation between signifier and signified is not arbitrary,” 25–6.
41. I have profited from conversation with Jim Holstun about this second meaning of Babel. David Loewenstein writes about the anti-tyrannical rhetoric as a component of Milton's myth-making in Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and about Babel as it is associated with the tyrant Nimrod (109–11), yet fails to note the Royalist perspective which Milton has co-opted for his own purposes.
42. Thomas Blount, Glossographia (1656), F2.
43. John Gauden, Eikon Basilike, in Early Modern Europe: Crisis of Authority, University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization, Vol., 6, Eric Cochrane, Charles M. Gray and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 442;
44. John Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. III, Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 598.
45. My notion of a “language” here derives from J.G.A. Pocock's essays, “Languages and Their Implications,” in his Politics, Language and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 3–41;
46. and “The Concept of a Language and the métier d'historien: Some Considerations of Practice,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, Anthony Pagden, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 19–38;
47. and also Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, James Tully, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 119–32.
48. Sampsons Foxes Agreed to Fire a Kingdom (1644).
49. J. Doughty, The King's Cause Rationally, briefly, and plainly debated (1644), 37.
50. Thomas Browne, “To the Reader,” Religio Medici, in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, C.A. Patrides, ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), 59.
51. “The Rebellion,” Rump: Or an Exact Collection … 1639 to Anno 1661, facs. ed. (London: Henry Brome and Henry Marsh, 1874), Vol. I, 291–5.
52. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper, 1978), 213, 270.
53. See also B. Capp, “Popular Literature,” in Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England, B. Reay, ed. (London: Longman, 1986), 198–243.
54. See his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2, though I lay weaker emphasis on the purely economic explanation for such distinctions than Bourdieu does.
55. The issues raised by a burgeoning popular literature are also discussed by Natalie Davis in “Printing and the People,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) and by Margaret Spufford in Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981). Though Spufford's book promises to be most appropriate here, her interest is more with the brute facts of literacy's spread and consumption of cheap printed matter than with the cultural impact of such circumstances on the higher orders of society.
56. A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria (1641), quoted in F. Seibert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 192.
57. Seibert attributes the utopia to Samuel Hartlib, but Charles Webster has argued more recently that it is the work of his associate Gabriel Plattes: The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1974), 369–85.
58. A. Remedie (1644); Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 27.
59. See Eamon Duffy, “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century, 1:1 (1986);
60. Annabel Patterson, “The Very Name of the Game: Theories of Order and Disorder,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 86:4 (1987), 519–43,
61. tracks the allusions to Cade and Tyler in the literature of the period; and the classic C. Hill's “The Many-Headed Monster,” in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 181–204.
62. Wharton, Mercurio-Coelico-Mastix (1644), 2.
63. Cyprian Blagden, “The Stationers' Company in the Civil War Period,” The Library, 5th ser., 13: 1 (1958), 1–17;
64. H.R. Plomer, “Secret Printing during the Civil War,” The Library, n.s., 5 (1904), 374–403;
65. Frederick S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 166–76;
66. Cyprian Blagden, “The ‘Company’ of Printers,” Studies in Bibliography, 13 (1960), 3–15;
67. William M. Clyde, “Parliament and the Press, 1643–7,” The Library, 4th ser., 14 (1934), 399–424.
68. See Brian Morris, “The Editions of Cleveland's Poems,” The Library, 5th ser., 14 (1964);
69. The Poems of John Cleveland, J.M. Berdan, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), and corrected by S.V. Gapp, “Notes on John Cleveland,” PMLA 46 (1931), 1075–86;
70. The Poems of John Cleveland, B. Morris and E. Worthington, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), xvii.
71. John Cleveland, “The Character of a London Diurnal,” in Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century, Henry Morley, ed. (London: Routledge, 1891), 308.
72. Patricia Higgins, “The reactions of women, with special reference to women petitioners,” in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, B. Manning, ed. (London: Arnold, 1973), 179–222;
73. K. Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” in Crisis in T. ed. 317–40.
74. So speculates S.V. Gapp, “Notes on John Cleveland,” PMLA 46 (1931), 1075–86.
75. On “translation” as a Puritan reading activity, see William Hunt, The Puritan Moment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 113.
76. On definition as an aspect of “wit,” see E. Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 125, 151–5. But definition is also an act of power. See Foucault, The Order of Things, 17–42.
77. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, C.B. Macpherson, ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), 368. All references to Leviathan will be to this edition. Page numbers will be cited in the text.
78. See Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971).
79. See Derek Attridge on etymology as fiction, “Language as History/History as Language: Saussure and the Romance of Etymology,” in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, eds., Post-structuralism and the Question of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 183–211.
80. J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1957), 17.
81. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 431.
82. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), on the epistemological meaning of the trope of copiousness.
83. Terence Ball, “Hobbes' Linguistic Turn,” Polity, 17 (1985), 739–60,
84. writes about the construction of language from point zero (751), though Ball equates the state of nature with Babel (749), thus eliminating the possibility of natural language at all. This Wittgensteinian interpretation over-values the arbitrariness at the expense of the natural, as opposed to Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957) who does the opposite. My thanks to Gordon Schochet for his insatiable zest in discussing Hobbes with me.
85. Hobbes, De Corpore, in The English works of Thomas Hobbes, W. Molesworth, ed. (London: John Bohn, 1839), I, 16.
86. Isabel C. Hungerland and George R. Vick, “Hobbes's Theory of Signification,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 11:4 (1973), 459–82, hold that Hobbes rationality as an axiom.
87. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 53.
88. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), argues that in Hobbes is incipient Rousseau in the sense of public opinion as volonté générale. I disagree, since the direction of authority in Hobbes is the opposite, from top down, though the end result might be the same.
89. See Leviathan, 165, on the danger of assuming communal acts are really acts of the will of the people - the susceptibility of the multitude to be led is the reason behind the need for an agreed-upon leader. Thanks to David Wootton for a vigorous discussion with me, on this topic.
90. See Stanley Fish, “The Plain Style Question,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), who argues as a conclusion to his brilliant collection of essays, that “the triumph of the plain style, then, is a triumph of epistemology” (381): yet what I present here gives that the motive for that triumph may be more fear than hope, and that the writers themselves may not have been aware that the language issue required a new epistemology.