Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s ed. by Tony Claydon and Thomas N. Corns (review)

The 1670s, claim the editors in their deft introduction to this symposium, were “a crucial turning point” (p. 3). Its seven essays both substantiate that claim and bear out the editor’s view that it is the Restoration, rather than the earlier revolutionary period, that now attracts the most exciting and innovative work in seventeenth-century studies. The collection is rich in new perspectives, new evidence, and new arguments, refreshing and revising our sense of supposedly familiar topics as it ranges across the three home kingdoms ruled by Charles II, New England, Roman Catholicism and Protestant dissent, identity at the national and the subjective level, literary cross-currents and transformations, and public and private spheres.

With wonderful élan and many palpable hits, James Grantham Turner demolishes the easy interpretative opposition of hedonistic Cavaliers against conscientious Puritans by exploring the “paradoxical correspondences” (p. 99) between John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, and John Milton to argue that “both were internal exiles from mainstream Restoration culture” (p. 104) sharing far more than is generally appreciated (including a disdain for the “vulgar” and a vituperatively obscene satirical bent); indeed, “Rochester is more ‘Puritan’ than Milton” (p. 124). Nigel Smith’s searching account of the rationalism, skepticism, and antclericalism of the prose Andrew Marvell and the Buckingham and Shaftesbury circles argues that in the 1670s a profound shift in the cultural and philosophical presumptions and expectations of the nation laid the foundations for the “radical Enlightenment” in England.

Nicky Hallett’s essay on the English Carmelite convent in Antwerp brings to light a wealth of archival evidence of their lives, experiences, records, and writings, although there is room to doubt whether Edward Said’s notions of the exilic state as median and suspended are helpful in discussion of monastic lives that, whatever their geographical location, are by choice and definition exilic (2 Cor. 6:17). Strangers and pilgrims take a very different course in Beth Lynch’s essay on John Bunyan. This originates in two acute and original perceptions: first, that at the opening of The Pilgrim’s Progress the author-narrator is identified as Jacob; and, second, that Esau nevertheless shadows this figure throughout the narrative. It is well understood that Hebrews 12:16–17 tolls throughout Grace Abounding, but not that The Pilgrim’s Progress’s apparently confident way to salvation is unsettled by continuing disquiet at the seeming selfishness and ruthlessness—the unethical “spiritual solipsism” (p. 79)—of the Reformed reduction of the Genesis story to a fable of election.

The current topical interest in Anglo-Scottish relations looks back to 1707. In an excellent and detailed essay, Clare Jackson addresses the little-known (and abortive) union negotiations of 1670 to argue convincingly that it was then that “the constitutional form” (p. 37) of the eventual union first took shape, as did the political objections to it, particularly in the arguments of the astute Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, whose posthumously published Discourse, Jackson shows, deserves a much higher reputation. Elliott Visconsi examines the ferocious King Philip’s War not (as customarily) in relation to the development of an American identity but from an old-world point of view to show that in London it was represented neither as just nor providential (nor even much to do with the native inhabitants) but as a self-imposed catastrophe brought down on a rogue state by its inefficient and persecutory colonial government. Tackling the apparently unpromising topic of loyal addresses, Edward Valance argues that they were as much an expression of popular political opinion and a constitutive part of the public sphere as the petitioning of radical politics—no mere passive expression of public support but critical and dialogic in manner.