"Eaters and Non-Eaters": John Cotton's A Brief Exposition of. .. Canticles in Light of Boston's (Lincs.) Religious and Civil Conflicts, 1619-22

Sometime in 1621–23, when he and many of his fellow Puritans were anticipating the millennium, John Cotton, then pastor at St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, preached a series of sermons on the Song of Solomon. In 1642 the sermons were published as A Brief Exposition Of the whole Book of Canticles, or, Song of Solomon; Lively describing the Estate of the Church in all the Ages thereof, both Jewish and Christian, to this day: And Modestly pointing at the Gloriousnesse of the restored Estate of the Church of the Iewes, and the happy accesse of the Gentiles in the approaching daies of Reformation, when the Wall of Partition shall bee taken away. A Work very usefull and seasonable to every Christian; but especially such as endeavour and thirst after the settling of Church and State, according to the Rule and Pattern of the Word of God.¹ Asking his listeners—St. Botolph's could seat the entire town's population of three thousand—to journey with him in their imaginations back in space and time to stand on the "mountaine of Activitie" (13) with King Solomon, looking down the vistas of history to the church they now inhabited, Cotton told them that Solomon's "sweet and precious, exquisite and amiable Resemblances, taken from the richest Jewels, the sweetest Spices, Gardens, Orchards, Vineyards, Winecellars, and the chiefest beauties of all the workes of God and Man" (9), enfolded the "historicall prophecie or propheticall history" (10) of the loving union of Christ and his church that would culminate when, as promised in the Book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem would descend like a bride. Warning them that they must not be distracted by the "amourousnesse of the dittie" (8), Cotton, as he was to do some 20 years later in New England when he again preached on Canticles, nevertheless encouraged them to love Christ with "Spirituall Concupiscence" (1655 8).²

For modern scholars, the two series of sermons on Canticles have furnished a rich trove for understanding Cotton's poetics.³ In this essay, I hope to add to our understanding of the 1642 series by taking a somewhat different approach, for while other critics have considered the sermons apart from their context of Boston, Lincs., in 1619–22, I have sought to embody them in the immediate and quotidian flesh of congregation and community. Cotton was—and thought himself to be—first and foremost, shepherd of Boston's souls, and his words were intended primarily to enable them to see the intimate link between the redemption taking place on the world's stage and that being enacted on the much smaller stage of their town in the Fens.

The validity of my argument hinges, then, on dating the delivery of the sermons with sufficient accuracy to be able to relate them to Boston at the time. I think we can date A Brief Exposition fairly accurately given the information available in three documents: the sermons themselves, Cotton's Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared, and John Preston's letter to Bishop Ussher in July 1622. Taken together, these three sources show that A Brief Exposition must, at least, have been preached after the fall of 1620 and before the fall of 1622. In A Brief Exposition, Cotton said: "So it is now with our brethren beyond the seas, whom you might have commended a yeere or two ago, and have found Christ there; but now he is gone" (92–93). In other words, a year or two before A Brief Exposition was preached, the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years' War was going well. Protestant fortunes turned in the summer of 1620 when Catholic forces invaded the Palatinate and defeated Frederick V at White Mountain outside Prague in November 1620. So on the basis of this reference alone (the wars began in 1618), Cotton must have preached A Brief Exposition in the fall of 1621 at the earliest, and in the fall of 1623 at the latest...