A window into the mental and cultural worlds of the Stuart period,
capturing the existing religious, social and political tensions on
the eve of the English Civil War. This book starts with an
extraordinary event and document. The event is the trial and
execution for infanticide of a puritan minister, John Barker, along
with his wife's niece and their maid, in Northampton in 1637; the
document,what appears to be a virtual transcript of Barker's last
speech on the gallows. His downfall soon became polemical fodder in
scribal publications, with Puritans circulating defences of Barker
and anti-Calvinists producing a Laudian condemnation of the
minister. Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England
uses Barker's crime and fate as a window on the religious world of
early modern England. It is based upon an extraordinary deposit of
manuscript and printed sources, all produced between 1637 and 1640
by people living in close proximity to one another and all of whom
knew one another, either as friends or more often as enemies.
Marshalling evidence frompublic polemical sources and from almost
entirely private ones - a diary, private letters and a spiritual
autobiography - the book is able to examine the same events and
persons, and beliefs and practices, from multiple perspectives: the
micro and the macro, the personal and the political, and the
affective and the doctrinal. Throughout, we meet a range of very
different people putting various bodies of religious theory into
practice, connecting the most local and particular of events and
rivalries to the great issues of the day and responding, in certain
cases, to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the temptations of
the devil. This approach enables a whole series of generalisations
to be explored: about the relation between politics and religion,
devotion and polemic, puritans and their enemies, local and
national affairs; between rumour, manuscript and print; and,
finally, about gender hierarchyand the social roles of men and
women. The result is an extraordinarily detailed and intimate
portrait of the religio- political scene in an English county on
the eve of civil war. PETER LAKE is Distinguished University
Professor of early modern English history at Vanderbilt. He is the
author of several studies of English religion, culture and politics
in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. ISAAC STEPHENS is
Assistant Professor of History at Saginaw Valley State University
and has published on early modern marriage, religion, and
life-writing.
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