Como Blown by the Spirit CJH

102 Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire XL, April/avril 2005 whether today's concerns over rudeness and incivility will not occasion a return to such time-honoured means of enforcing civilized behaviour. Lorraine Attreed College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England, by David R. Como. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004. xiv, 513 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). This is an excellent book and an impressive debut from a new scholar. David Como's subject is the pre-1640 activities and intellectual beliefs of the "antinomians" (a loose but useful term — and in this case quite necessary as a distinction from the old catch-all "puritan"). We have known for a long time in detail about the predilections of Elizabethan and early Stuart "mainstream puritans" — the fact that this phrase is no longer remotely oxymoronic indicates just how far ecclesiastical historiography has moved in twenty-five years. Venerable tomes by William Haller and others once chronicled in detail the interests and beliefs of those from William Perkins through William Prynne who once appeared (to the whiggishly inclined) the avatars of religious freedom and toleration, closely linked to nascent parliamentary democracy, or (for American scholars), to the founding of the northern colonies and the genesis of the "New England Mind." The radical children of this puritanism were first studied in their own right during the early 1970s by the late Christopher Hill in one of his finest works. The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, UK, 1975) and, in passing, by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971). Since Hill, of course, the entire framework of Elizabethan and early Stuart religious history has been, itself, turned upside down, sideways and inside out: first by the frontal attack of Nicholas Tyacke and those who have made puritans simply a "hotter sort of protestant" and the real "revolutionaries" their antiCalvinist enemies; and then by the rearguard assault of the "slow Reformation" historians (Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy, Jack Scarisbrick, and mid-career Patrick CoUinson) who have argued —pace both Geoffreys, Dickens, and Elton — that Catholicism itself endured well into Elizabeth's reign and was not a straw house, easily toppled by a puff of air from the Henrician wolf This "revisionism" (which connects in many ways to the political-history revisionism of Russell, Fletcher, Morrill, Kishlansky, and others) has been highly persuasive, but it has also left some things unexplained. And, as with most historiographic trends, it has dialectically generated its own antithesis: reaction or at least serious second-guessing has set in, sometimes known as "post-revisionism." (In bygone times we happily called such intellectual movements "counterreform" or "counter-revolutionary"; current vogue necessitates "post" as the prefix dejour.) The most infiuential figure in post-revisionist religious history (apart Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire XL, April/avril 2005 103 from late-career Patrick CoUinson) has probably been Peter Lake, who in a welter of books and articles has re-calibrated the study of Puritanism and gauged the various degrees of "hotter." We now have, thanks to Lake and his students (Como among them), a more nuanced and complex view of the gradations of religious difference. And a colourfiil spectrum it is, ranging from Laud and his sidekicks at one end (including crypto-Catholics and church papists, though this is no more monolithic a group than the puritan) through a Presbyterian like Nehemiah Wallington — known most familiarly through the work of Como's Stanford mentor, Paul Seaver — to more eccentric figures at the other end such as the box-maker, John Etherington. With the book under review rounding out the subject, it might become modish to refer to a "Lake Como" thesis, though that would understate the originality and independence of Dr. Como's own achievement. It would also ignore one significant difference, namely Como's tendency, even while acknowledging their common roots, to draw starker lines between mainstream and radical than those posited by Lake's "fuzzy-edged" treatment of the interfaces between the groups,. One of the phenomena left unexplained by both Hill and the revisionists is "whence sprang the radicals of the 1640s and 1650s?" The assorted General Baptists, Muggletonians, Boehmenists, Grindletonians, Ranters, Seekers, and, eventually, Quakers clearly had some sort of pre-war pedigree, but it was remarkably unclear and seldom differentiated from capital "P" Puritanism. In part, this was a problem of sources. Rigorous episcopal censorship (more effective on religious texts than in other spheres) kept the circulation and supply of radical texts to a minimum, and their authorship often anonymous. Documentary details on the humbler sort were just as scarce. Particular studies like Murray Tolmie's Triumph of the Saints on London's separate churches (somewhat neglected by Como), and the various books on millenarianism that appeared in the 1970s provided some help, as does more recent work on the Family of Love, but little has been known, for instance, about the early history of a group like the Grindletonians. More seriously, the theology of adherents to such beliefs was not well understood. One of the many virtues of Como's careful work is its ability to delineate between species of antinomian, and between these and the common-orgarden puritan. The latter, which would include the likes of Wallington, saw the sectary on their doorstep as a bigger and more destabilizing threat than the Laudian authorify outside or the papal antichrist abroad: heretics are always scarier than infidels. (One is reminded of the British Parliamentary Labour party in the 1980s and its purges of "Militant Tendency" and the "Tribune Group" to the left and the Social Democrats to the right, conducted to the amusement and profit of Thatcherites.) The final chapter of the book handles this especially well, revealing how a left-bank-of-mainstreamer like Henry Burton could manage to make his own ears the meat in a theological sandwich as he simultaneously attacked both Laudians and antinomians. The core oiBlown by the Spirit, following a chronological and scene-setting overview, is a series of focused chapters on the likes of John Traske (not the judaising Saturday-sabbatarian of the early Jacobean period, who had strong and literal respect for the Mosaic law, but Traske's later, antinomian self). 104 Canadian Joumal of HistorylAnnales canadiennes d'histoire XL, April/avril 2005 Particularly detailed is the elucidation of the differences of opinion between the followers of John Eaton and John Everarde on fine points of faith and salvation. This is the kind of detailed brushwork that we have had for thirty years on eschatological belief, but now applied to soteriology, with the individual's relationship to both the moral and ritual law of the Torah the rubber hitting the road to salvation. Como's Linnaean taxonomy continues with a Mendelian essay on "hybrid" forms and a brief chapter on the most extreme forms of "Ultra-antinomianism" wherein obedience to the Law is rendered superfluous even in outward form. The book's money shot, however, is a passage (p. 391) which argues, from admitted "shreds" of evidence, that the "extreme anti-formalism" of the civil war Sects did not grow up de novo simply in response to the collapse of order during the civil war, but had been sprouting naturally on the outer shelves of the antinomian greenhouse for quite some time. Como's book, though long, is well-written; it is somewhat under-footnoted, and the highly fragmentary evidence has had to be generously extrapolated from, though not unreasonably so. Combined with other recent work on early-modem religious history, it offers a much more satisfactory explanation of the continuities between Jacobean puritanism and interregnum radicalism, and of the fissures and fault-lines running through the religious underground prior to the earthquake of the 1640s. Daniel Woolf University of Alberta John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth Century England, by Reid Barbour. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003. x, 381 pp. $70.00 Cdn (cloth). This book, by a scholar of literature, deals with a subject previously treated by historians. The most recent study is by Paul Christianson who, over a period of 15 years, sifted through Selden's work, and developed an interpretation that drew on a solid grasp of the political and religious history of early Stuart England. That book. Discourse on History, Law, and Governance in the Public Career of John Selden 1610-1635 (Toronto, 1996), won the John Ben Snow Prize and stands as the study of Selden. Barbour does not openly quarrel with Christianson or any other scholar. Nevertheless, he purports to offer the first "complete" intellectual portrait of his subject, one that aims to uncover the central preoccupation of Selden's career. This, in brief, was the search for the "measures" of a holy commonwealth: that is, how to balance law and conscience, civil and ecclesiastical polity (pp. 9-21). Barbour sees Selden as having worked toward an original solution to the problem of reconciling politics — the realm of law and human custom — with pure religion — the wholly invisible body of Christians joined to one another in the practice of pure doctrine. The model was drawn from Jewish antiquity, and specifically the senate of the Sanhedrin, which oversaw a collection of religious and politically autonomous "cantons" (pp. 295-342). Selden, argues Barbour, sought to maintain religion as a pillar of polity, while removing