Abstract
In his detailed study of early modern pamphlets, Joad Raymond notes how eclectic this category of writing is, while at the same time offering a clear definition of the pamphlet as a text of a specific (small) size, typically consisting of ‘between one sheet and a maximum of twelve sheets, or between eight and ninety-six pages in quarto’.1 As we will see in Part III of this book, the pamphlet form covered a multitude of genres, especially those associated loosely with news. But in the area of religion there were a significant number of diverse pamphlets published, from homiletic and pious works aimed at a readership from those of a relatively low status, through to more radical and politically controversial works. I want to begin with the kind of religious pamphlet studied closely by Tessa Watt, the title of whose study, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, underlines how religious pamphlets of various colours were a product of the explosion of affordable printed material.2 (However, it is important to note that ‘popular’ pamphlets were not simply read by those of a lower status, but were also collected, often avidly, by much more sophisticated and wealthy readers.)3 I then want to discuss devotional material intimately related to the established Church, before concluding with more conventional material aimed at a relatively elite audience that nevertheless always had political reverberations.
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Notes
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), further references in parentheses.
For a comprehensive study of the influence of ‘Laudianism’ on the arts in the 1620s and 1630s see Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006).
For a concise account see the introduction to Linda Phyllis Austern et al., eds, Psalms in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
For a general account see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The authoritative edition of the psalms is The Collected Works of Mary Sidney, ed. Margaret Hannay et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), vol. 2; see Hannay’s recent account of responses to the psalms in ‘Re-revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and Her Early Modern Readers’, in Austern et al., eds, Psalms, pp. 219–33.
In what follows I rely on the illuminating article by James Doelman, ‘George Wither, the Stationers Company and the English Psalter’, SP 90 (1993), pp. 74–82; Doelman notes that there were over three hundred editions published between 1603 and 1640.
See in general the thorough consideration in Karl Joseph Holtgen, ‘New Verse by Francis Quarles: The Portland Manuscripts, Metrical Psalms, and the Bay Psalm Book’, ELR 28 (1998), pp. 118–41.
For this side of Hall see Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford University Press, 1982).
Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 302 and n. 159; see also Paul A. Welsby, George Abbot the Unwanted Archbishop (London: SPCK, 1962), p. 21;
H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud: 1573–1645, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 37–8,
who speculates that the volume was published by a supporter of Abbot, but this seems unlikely given the coat of arms on the title page. There were three issues of the Treatise, with slight variations, see Richard A. Christophers, George Abbot Archbishop of Canterbury 1562–1633: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), pp. 25–30.
For perhaps the most convenient summing up of the historiographical situation, see the essays in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2000).
Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 106 and see chap. 5 passim.
While Tyacke’s account has been challenged, notably by Peter White in Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge University Press, 1992), he seems to me to best describe the clear divisions and conflicts late in the decade between figures like Abbot or indeed Prynne, and figures like Laud and Neile.
For a brief account, see John Cosin, A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. P. G. Stanwood with Daniel O’Connor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. xli–xliii; for example, ‘hee may rise againe with the iust, and receiue this dead body, which must now be buried in the earth, to bee ioyned with his soule, and bee made pure and incorruptible’, becomes ‘hee may rise againe with the iust, his body being reunited to his soule, pure and incorruptible’ (sig. U5 both eds).
For general accounts of Prynne, see William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963)
and William M. Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London: UCL Press, 1996);
for the queen’s acting see Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 58–71.
For a detailed biographical account, see Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies: Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), and also Cope’s edited selection of Davies’s work, Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies (Oxford University Press, 1995), which includes A Warning.
For the most incisive account of the nexus between women’s religious writing and politics later in the century, see Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps 3, 4 and 7;
the pioneering work which focuses especially on Quaker women is Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
See Cope, Prophetic Writings, p. xiv; Trapnel did also write some of the works associated with her prophetic visions in the 1650s. For a theoretically inflected account concentrating on Trapnel and other mid to late seventeenth-century women see Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester University Press, 1996).
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Salzman, P. (2014). Pamphlets/Doctrine. In: Literature and Politics in the 1620s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305985_6
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