- Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context ed. by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan
These essays, ranging in subject from letter writing to building a personal library, provide an intimate and nuanced portrait of English radicalism from 1680 to 1730.
In “Seventeenth-Century Italy and English Radical Movements,” Stefano Villani explores “the attitude Italian intellectuals held towards the religious debate that characterized the English Revolution.” In Italy the Revolution is understood as more religious than political. “Seventeenth-century Italians were astounded by the proliferation of sects in England.” Knowledge of English radical developments was surprisingly widespread. “In seventeenth-century Italy even people such as the Inquisitor of Pisa who, so far as can be surmised, had no specific interest in English history, knew something about English radical movements.” Books were written in Italy about Cromwell, including a biography published in 1675. “What is noteworthy,” writes Mr. Villani, is “that all Italian historians writing about England during the 1640s and 1650s were unambiguously sympathetic towards the defeated Royalists.”
There were sensational accounts of a nation suffering the consequences of rejecting [End Page 61] Catholicism. The image of this milieu that reached Italy was one of “madness and meaningless extravagances dangerous to civil life and political order.” Protestant England birthed monsters, including “Quakers, Ranters and Levellers,” who were “instances of the insanity to which abandoning the Catholic Church could lead.” Such excesses were “the paradoxical fruit of an intolerable religious tolerance which had excluded the true Church.” Mr. Villani’s research leads him to question “whether the terms ‘radical’ and ‘radicalism’ can be used in a seventeenth-century Italian context.”
In “A Radical Review of the Cambridge Platonists,” Sarah Hutton “make[s] a case for their inclusion more centrally in the history of the English Revolution and its aftermath.” While their influence on natural philosophy was substantial, their “intellectual modernity did not translate into political radicalism” even though some “supported Cromwell’s endeavors to readmit Jews to England.” Ms. Hutton asks “why they were not better advocates for their position, and why their heterodoxy and political engagement is so singularly lacking from their reputation.” One answer is found in the Platonists’ “own efforts at respectable self-presentation after the Restoration.” She concludes that “it is hard to sustain the view that the Cambridge Platonists were other-worldly mystics, detached from all political engagement, who transcended the divisions of their time and faded out with the dawn of the eighteenth century.”
Warren Johnston’s “Radical Revelation? Apocalyptic Ideas in Late Seventeenth-Century England” advances a well-documented and thorough assessment of the influence of apocalyptic thinking. According to Mr. Johnston, “The most productive voice of Anglican apocalyptic interpretation in the 1690s was Walter Garrett,” who “maintained that the restored king had been ‘in the Hands of Christ, a Noble Instrument of our Political Redemption.” A “means of bringing together heaven and earth,” apocalyptic images assured audiences of the former’s influence on the latter. However, “The repeated warnings against human efforts to bring about the millennium demonstrate a continued concern over the potential of apocalyptic thought to inspire radical action.” Apocalyptic imagery in the seventeenth century was “not found in radicalism alone, but in more moderate expressions of Anglicanism and dissent.” Such proliferation could be radical or not: apocalypticism “was neither one-dimensional nor static, adapting to encompass the century’s upheavals and to suit various needs.”
In “Mapping Friendship and Dissent: The Letters from Joseph Boyse to Ralph Thoresby, 1680–1710,” Sandra Hynes explores personal correspondence. Boyse’s letters “helped … sustain religious dissent transnationally.” These religiously tolerant letters provide intimate glimpses of historical events such as “the sufferings of the Huguenots in France.” A religious moderate, Boyse was “ready to defend Presbyterian principles in print against blows from members of the Established Church yet also ready to join forces with sympathetic Anglicans against Catholicism.” These letters reveal the “international nature of non-conformity” and “that Presbyterians sought to gain ground in Ireland.”
In “The Books and Times of...