Abstract
Surveying the state of religious health in the nation, one pseudonymous 1656 pamphlet pronounced England’s condition dire. Disease was reaching epidemic proportions which, left unchecked, would place the commonwealth in grave and perhaps mortal danger:
should the contagion of those plagues continue to infect persons of all ranks and sexes a few years longer after the same rate of success (and probably it will much more, or some other Judgement befall us in stead of it, if yet the Magistrate lay it not to heart) it will no doubt endanger both Ministry and Magistracy, the Oracles of God, and the Laws of the Land.2
I would like to thank Claire Carlin for organizing the symposium ‘Infection without Germs: Christianity and Contagion in Early Modern Europe’, held in Victoria, BC in September 2003.1 am grateful to Michael Finlayson, Ian Gentles, Barbara Todd and Tanya Hagen for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Notes
A Friend of true Reformation, A Lamentable Representation of the Effects of the present Toleration (London, 1656), p. 3.
For a recent study, see J. G. Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modem England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Among the most useful studies of anti-Catholic polemic are A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in The English Civil War, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (London and New York: Arnold, 1997), pp. 181–210.
R. Baxter, A Key for Catholicks (London, 1659), p. 276.
Luke Fawne et al., A Beacon set on fire (London, 1652) and A second beacon fired (London, 1654).
[Michael Sparke], A second beacon fired by Scintilla (London, 1652).
John Barclay, ed., The Diary of Alexander Jaffray (Aberdeen: G. and R. King, 1856), p. 45.
Cyprien de Gamache, ‘Memoirs of the Mission in England of the Capuchin Friars of the Province of Paris, from the Year 1630 to 1669’, in The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. T. Birch, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1849), 2, p. 309.
A. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modem England (1993; rpt Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999).
J. Bossy argues that occasional conformity dwindled by the turn of the sixteenth century in The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975), p. 187.
J. C. H. Aveling, however, contends that not only did it remain a common practice, especially among male heads of households throughout the seventeenth century but it also ensured the survival of the Catholic faith in England; The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976), p. 162.
The significance of women’s roles and the household in sustaining Catholicism are examined in F. E. Dolan, ‘Gender and the “Lost” Spaces of Catholicism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), 651–64; and idem., Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
M. B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. M. Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 149–80.
A. F. Mariotti, ‘Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits, and Ideological Fantasies’, in idem, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modem English Texts (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 1–34.
For Catholicism in the Caroline court, see C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
For the use of print to influence public opinion, see J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. pp. 80–126.
D. Stevenson, ‘A Revolutionary Regime and the Press: the Scottish Covenanters and their Printers, 1638–51’, in Union, Revolution and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), pp. 315–37.
Henry Parker, Scotlands Holy War (London, 1651), pp. 12, 29–31.
Thomas Tillam, Banners of Love (London, 1654), p. 27.
Thomas Weld, A False Jew (London, 1653), sig. Ev; The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. A. MacFarlane (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1976), p. 368.
J. S., A brief and perfect Journal of the Late Proceedings and Successe of the English Army in the West-Indies (London, 1655), p. 5.
Faithful Teate, The Character of Crueltie (London, 1656), sig. A8.
J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration 1588–1689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 157.
R. Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 28–9; Aveling, The Handle and the Axe, pp. 175–8.
T. Smith, ‘The Persecution of Staffordshire Roman Catholic Recusants: 1625–1660’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979) 334–7.
C. Hibbard, ‘Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Visions’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980) 20–1.
M. Questier, ‘Sir Henry Spiller, Recusancy and the Efficiency of the Jacobean Exchequer’, Historical Research, 66 (1993) 251–66.
P. Lake with M. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 6.
W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millenium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 283.
For studies of liberty of conscience in the interregnum, see J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, ed. J. Morrill (London: Longham, 1990), pp. 193–6, 202.
B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration: Studies in Church History, 21 (1984) 199–233.
C. Polizzotto, ‘Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648–9’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 26 (1975) 71–2, 79.
J. Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998) 961–85.
John Owen, A sermon preached to the Honourable House of Commons …on January 31 (London, 1649), p. 41.
Anon., A True State of the Case of Liberty of Conscience (London, 1655), pp. 10–11.
Edward Barber, An Answer to the Essex Watchmen’s Watchword (London, 1649), p. 16.
[Henry Vane Jr], Zeal Examined (London, 1652), pp. 11, 18–21.
N. Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan revolution’, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. O. P. Grell and R. Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 216–30.
D[aniel] R[ogers], The Essex Watchmens Watchword (London, 1649), pp. 8–9.
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Greenspan, N. (2005). Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England. In: Carlin, C.L. (eds) Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522619_14
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