In this chapter I want to talk about puritanism as a stereotype and about anti-puritanism, a discourse organised around that stereotype as an ideology, by which I mean a way of looking at the world and explaining what has gone wrong with it and what to do about it. Anti-puritanism provided a narrative, or series of narratives, about the recent past, the present and immediate future, a narrative that identified the villains and heroes of the piece. It thus provided a way of ordering experience, and of
between 1610 and 1616. 4 They were all what have come to be known as ‘city comedies’, a genre which Jonson had done much to produce and refine. As such, they all staged a fallen world defined by commerce, greed and hypocrisy, a world in which a series of fools, buffoons, thieves, alchemists, puritans and projectors combine to swindle and outwit one another in search of money, status, food and sex. 5 It is of course well known that Jonson’s city comedies satirised alchemists, puritans and projectors. 6 We
Early modern stereotypes are often studied as evidence of popular belief, something mired with prejudices and commonly held assumptions. This volume of essays goes beyond this approach, and explores practices of stereotyping as contested processes. To do so the volume draws on recent works on social psychology and sociology. The volume thereby brings together early modern case studies, and explores how stereotypes and their mobilisation shaped various negotiations of power, in spheres of life such as politics, religion, everyday life and knowledge production. The volume highlights early modern men’s and women’s remarkable creativity and agency: godly reformers used the ‘puritan’ stereotype to understand popular aversion to religious discipline; Ben Jonson developed the characters of the puritan and the projector in ways that helped diffuse anxieties about fundamental problems in early modern church and state; playful allusions to London’s ‘sin and sea coal’ permitted a knowing acceptance of urban growth and its moral and environmental costs; Tory polemics accused of ‘popery’ returned the same accusations to Whig Protestants; humanists projected related Christian stereotypes outwards to make sense of Islam and Hinduism in the age of Enlightenment. Case studies collectively point to a paradox: stereotyping was so pervasive and foundational to social life and yet so liable to escalation that collective engagements with it often ended up perpetuating the very processes of stereotyping. By highlighting these dialectics of stereotyping, the volume invites readers to make fresh connections between the early modern past and the present without being anachronistic.
discussion is focused on the later Stuart period but extends into the later eighteenth century. Its primary aim is to clarify how the politics of stereotyping related to popery and puritanism (discussed above by Harris, Lake, Peters and Morton) were transformed and deployed in Enlightenment depictions of societies outside western Europe, and in particular the Ottoman empire. This was one way in which post-Reformation stereotypes enjoyed wide currency well beyond the end of the seventeenth century, lending themselves, on new
that broke out in 1642 and led ultimately to the downfall of Charles I. Allegations of refusing to respect royal authority could equally well be made against the English puritans, and indeed were. The joke, we might suggest, relies on an English royalist association of a particular strand of Protestant religiosity with hostility towards monarchy. The joke arguably tells us less about English attitudes towards the Scots than it does about the political and religious anxieties of the era, with humour serving as a
may have motivated the negativity and contrasting it with Hollywood’s more positive or at the very least ambivalent portrayal. The Puritans (1924) details the hardships encountered by some of the country’s first white inhabitants: ‘Privation and sorrow are the common lot during these early days in Massachusetts’, declares an intertitle. The first part of the film establishes
England the social activity of dancing was fiercely criticized because of the opportunity it afforded for partners to come into close proximity with, and physically touch, someone of the opposite sex: ‘what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching & slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and vncleane handling is not practiced euery wher in these dauncings?’2 These words, spoken by the puritanical character of Philoponus in The Anatomy of Abuses, may indeed be the viewpoint of the puritan writer Philip Stubbes whose published work was a
was again forced to adopt a host of economy measures, some of them seemingly trivial, and puritans began to attack minor extravagances as grave lapses of discipline. On the other hand the University had to think of selling its services and of collaborating, not only with public institutions and Government departments, but also with industrial and commercial concerns. Its purpose in doing so was not just to raise money, but to demonstrate its usefulness to society and the economy, to win friends and restore itself to favour; it was important not to get involved in
, pt 1, p. 616; The National Archives, PC 2/11 fol. 129, 9 January 1577. 40 British Library (BL), Lansdowne MS 168/9, fol. 73, D. Hilles to Sir Julius Caesar concerning a project for levying penalties upon penal statutes, 4 May 1607. 41 ‘Southwell to Verstegan’, p. 11. See also [Verstegan], A declaration , p. 59. 42 Samuel Rawson Gardiner (ed.), The constitutional documents of the puritan revolution, 1625–1660 , 3rd
agreement existed on what constituted the proper bounds of English Protestantism. Across the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various Protestant groups – initially puritans and anti-puritans and latterly episcopal royalists and nonconformists – used anti-popery against one another, redefining what ‘Protestant’ encompassed by excluding their opponents from that term as ‘popish’. This had severe ramifications for the Crown. What had originally been a means of defending royal supremacy following the papal Bull