Huntington Library despatches 2: He said what??

OK, this one has me foxed, people.

In the Ellesmere MSS at the Huntington is a letter (MS EL 7977) which is, or purports to be, a letter from the puritan Exeter merchant Ignatius Jurdain to his son. It's undated, but Jurdain died in 1640.

The handlist to the Ellesmere manuscripts raises the possibility it is false, and perhaps the work of an Anabaptist, but there is certainly nothing Anabaptistical about it. Most of it seems like classic firebreathing Puritanism, of the kind we know Jurdain embraced (Samuel Clark wrote up his life). He is worried that his son is conforming to prayer-book religion, and much of the letter is unbalanced denunciations of the marriage ceremony (the phrase 'with my body I thee worship' is idolatrous, apparently), vestments, and - a more unusual preoccupation - of 'that hellish stick fetched out of Baals grove,the Maypole'. So far so good.

The boy is also urged to read good English divines, chiefly Dodd, Cleaver and Perkins, and to 'beware of vaine Philosophie, of the Heathen greeke, and of the Beasts language'. The idea that Latin is a gateway drug to popery is certainly unusual.

But then, in a final paragraph written to address the boy's 'Carnall infirmity', we find this:

I warne yo^w touchinge the bodye of the sisters, that yo^w ayme not soe much att their flesh, as att their spiritt rather make vse of yo^r Christian liberty in the howses of sinn.

Uh? I am not entirely sure I understand what he is saying, but it looks to me as if he is recommending his son visit brothels rather than lusting after godly women. That seems, um, out of keeping with the ethos of the rest of the letter? So is it a spoof? Is it an indication of a father-son relationship unravelling the father's principles? Is hypocrisy, or at least an indication that some Puritans had reached the point where maypoles were worse than fornication?

UPDATE 18 AUG: The mine of knowledge that is Arnold Hunt tells me that this letter was printed, apparently from another copy, in Notes & Queries in 1875. Which, as he suggests, tips the balance in favour if it being a satire or spoof of some sort. It still strikes me as an odd satire - pretty subtle apart from that last bombshell? I wonder if it might be based on a real text by Jurdain, but deliberately exaggerated or laced with other comments in order to discredit him? He was a man with a lot of enemies.

Huntington Library despatches 1: Bears and squirrels

Thanks to the combined generosity of the Leverhulme Trust and the Huntington Library themselves, I have a delightful month to spend at this excellent institution, to which, shamefully, I’ve never yet been. It’s much like any top-rank library, except it’s 30 degrees C outside, and my family texted me this morning to tell me that a policeman had showed up at the house where we’re staying and advised them to go indoors because there was a bear in the next door garden.

But who cares about that when there are new manuscripts to play with? Today’s treat was a collection of anti-Parliamentary ballads from the 1640s, some but not all of which were published in the magnificently titled RUMP of 1662.

My favourite, which doesn't appear in the published version, is a cruel squib on Lady Grey of Groby, wife of a senior Parliamentarian general and regicide, who – supposedly – gave birth to ‘an Infant with a head like a hare and the tayle of a squirrel’. Tales of monstrous births like this, usually seen as judgements on the immorality of the parents, were common enough, but this one is done with a sharp comic edge. The monster, we read, ‘had been a beast at best of all / Had she brought forth a Gray’. And that fits with a wider sense that the entire parliamentary party are in some sense monstrous, and that the worst ‘ugly monsters’ are those that have been ‘hach’t by th’Assembly’s braine’ – meaning the Westminster Assembly, charged with the doomed attempt to create a new Protestant settlement for Britain.

What makes this more than routine name-calling, though, is its ironic voice, sustained almost to the end: in which it robustly denies that this and the many, many other monsters of all kinds which parliamentarians are bringing forth mean anything at all. Or as the subtitle puts it: ‘Whereby you may note, that the pious and godly / may be brought to bed of things that look odly.’

Madeleine Ward on Quakers' persecution

Without wishing to make this all about me: this is, for me, a first. I've had many outstanding MA students, and I've had a student doing a research MA (hello, Karl Jones) who published an article off the back of it, an article which I shamelessly nabbed for a book I was editing.

But Maddy Ward did a taught MA in 2013-14, and the dissertation, which I supervised, was only a third of the total course. In theory she was supposed to get it done to hand in in mid-September.

Awkwardly, she had researched and written what was clearly an outstanding dissertation by June. I didn't think that two and a half months polishing it was a good use of anyone's time. So we (by which I mean, she) set about converting it into a publishable article. She submitted it to Quaker Studies just after she left Durham for Oxford (boo, hiss) to pursue her PhD with Sarah Apetrei (hurray!); it was accepted, and it's just appeared.

And a very good piece it is too: on the distinctive theological response that early Quakers had to persecution, which drew on but was also distinct from classical Protestant martyrology, infused as it was with the Quaker emphasis on personal transformation. Her fundamental point, that we need to take Quakers' ideas seriously rather than simply seeing them as reacting to external stimuli, is a nourishing one. It's a great piece, and she's a scholar to watch.

IJBS 2016: Quaker mothers and genocidal castaways

Some highlights from the conference of the International John Bunyan Society in Aix-en-Provence: though some of the highlights, from the sun-baked stone to the sound of the crickets, you'll have to take on trust. Why aren't more conferences like this?

Wrenching my attention back to academic matters, the best papers I've heard so far would include Naomi Pullin (currently stuck in postdoc hell at Warwick) on women Quakers 1650-1750. The standard view, part of the consensus that Quakerism calmed down and got domesticated, is that women stopped being prominent Quaker evangelists and were therefore excluded from ministry. Naomi's point is that, by 1750, 90% or more of Quakers were the children of Quakers. Therefore almost all the work of conversion was being done in the home, by women, with children. She has evidence that Quaker women saw this as their vocation, not too different from the work of the public evangelists of the first generation. So Quakerism may have been 'domesticated': but that didn't make it any less powerful.

The most startling paper, however, was from Nicholas Seager, at Keele, on Robinson Crusoe. I didn't know that Daniel Defoe was a Dissenter: nor that he wrote three volumes about Crusoe. Volume one is the famous one. Volume two is a further set of voyages to Madagascar, China and elsewhere, in which amongst other things Crusoe witnesses and is rather unhappy about various atrocities against pagan peoples. Volume three is his 'serious reflections' on his fictional voyages, a set of essays which are apparently quite dull. Until the end. That's when Crusoe suddenly declares that the Christian powers ought to conquer the rest of the planet in order to allow the Gospel to be brought to all humanity. This is fundamentally an act of kindness, he insists. He does argue that such conquests should be bloodless, 'as far as in them lies'. But he has no doubt it can be done. Perhaps China (a country with which he seemed particularly obsessed) could put a million-strong army into the field. Crusoe is sure that a force of 30,000 German and English foot, and 10,000 French horse, would slaughter them.

In other words: uh????

My first thought hearing Nick summarise this was, it's a spoof. Defoe is being ironic. Nick considered this option and concluded  it's not so, or at least not quite. Yes, this plan is self-contradictory in places and is put into the voice of a fictional character, whose own behaviour on this issue has been very inconsistent across the three volumes. But Defoe did write openly ironic, satirical works and this one has quite a different feel. Nick's conclusion is - I think! - that Defoe half meant it: that he was using the device of the fictional voice to play with a dark fantasy of quick, easy world evangelism-at-gunpoint that he knew was a fantasy but still felt tempted by. I was put in mind of the militaristic fantasies which talk of war can provoke otherwise sensible people into in our own day. It would be so appealing if problems really could be destroyed precisely with laser-guided bombs.

Whether Nick is right about Defoe, I can't say. But it sounded plausible to me: and, more important, fascinating.

JEH 67/3: Marriage and other capital crimes

Normally the Journal of Ecclesiastical History stipulates that articles should be no more than 8000 words in length, so running to under 20 pages. Occasionally, for a really strong piece, we’re willing to stretch that a little, especially if the extension is in response to our recommendations for revision. So it tells you something that the new edition includes a 55-page article. André Vitória’s ‘Two Weddings and a Lawsuit’ is really quite a piece. More than half of that page extent consists of appendices, transcribing in full a set of court documents in Portuguese found in the Vatican archives.

A Portuguese matrimonial dispute from 1369 involving nobody anyone has ever heard of might not seem to be the most promising basis for an article. But a three things set this apart.

First, Vitória can write. This is academic prose at its best – precise, scholarly, but full of life and spirit. All too rare, especially when united with top-notch research as it is here.

Second, he has a terrific story to tell. The unfolding mess of bigamy, secret marriages, theft, family feuds and deception is as gripping as any court-based microhistory you may care to name.

This is not a new Martin Guerre, however, since the documents aren’t extensive enough to allow it. What it is, and this is the third and the genuinely important point, is a window into how both ecclesiastical law and civil law touched everyday life in an ordinary corner of medieval Europe. What Vitória has done is to demonstrate how closely all the participants in the dispute – except perhaps the hapless bigamist at its centre, whose crime could have and possibly did cost him his life – understood where the legal fault-lines were, and shaped their testimony and their behaviour accordingly.

Much of this hinges around the tension between marriage as a public event, defined socially, a matter of family and property; and marriage as a sacrament, a private and perhaps secret commitment between two individuals. The theology was clear and, in the medieval social context, terribly impractical. Secret marriage was easy to contract and impossible to prove. Or, as Vitória felicitously puts it: ‘A slip of the tongue was all it took to create an indissoluble marriage; stout denial all it took to end it.’ We’ve rarely been shown with more care how those problems actually played out in the reality of people’s lives.

Start again from our beginnings

So, post the Brexit vote ... Time to stop just being stunned and angry, and work out the best way out of this mess. I now actually think there are reasons to be hopeful.

Here’s what a good outcome looks like, in ascending order of achievability.

1. Internationalism, internationalism, internationalism. Leaving the EU need not mean closing of borders, drawing up of bridges, revoking of treaties, shrinking of horizons. Various Leave-ers have been promising that it would not. They need to be held to their word.

2. We remain in the single market. Neither the Norwegian nor the Swiss terms would exactly work, nor would they be exactly available, but something of that sort is very possible. Necessarily this would involve free movement, though presumably not simple access to benefits for migrants. – I spent some time in Norway earlier this month. You could do a lot worse.

3. The UK holds together. The single market is what could make this possible, since it means we can avoid closing the Irish border, and that the calculus of risk for the Scots becomes finely balanced. I note that Nicola Sturgeon’s statement emphasised keeping Scotland in the EU or at least in the single market. If it becomes possible to remain in the single market without breaking from the UK, embracing the euro, etc etc then the outcome of a second indyref becomes much less certain, and the SNP – which cannot afford to lose a second one – may not risk it.

4. It becomes possible to reconsider the vote to leave. The ‘re-run the referendum’ cry is obviously futile, but useful to this extent: it emphasises that the losing side is not lying down and taking this, and that a 52-48 win based on some deeply mendacious claims is not a mandate for anything beyond the bare question asked. As the SNP said in similar circumstances: if there is a material change in our situation, then it becomes legitimate to re-ask the question. Thus: if either a noticeably different relationship with the EU is on offer (that seems unlikely) or the EU itself changes noticeably, such that membership did not mean the same as once it did (which seems more possible, given the turmoil), then a new vote and a Breturn is on the cards.

So, how do we get there?

1. Break up the Leave coalition. Happily this is dead easy, because they can’t agree on anything. The Tory Brexiteers, especially the splendidly opportunistic Mr Johnson, do not appear to have an appetite for taking us out of the single market. Not least because they, too, want to keep the UK together. What we want is for UKIP to be hopping up and down and shouting ‘betrayal’ in a few months’ time.

2. Get a functioning opposition which will force the Tories to contest the political centre. Hard to see how this happens at present. Still, anything’s possible.

3. Ensure that MPs, especially the large cross-party Remain majority, understand that their voters expect them to stand by their principles and to interpret this referendum strictly and minimally.

4. Tell a bigger story about Brexit. Immigration was the immediate issue, and that makes the whole thing look like a xenophobic spasm, but us Remainers need to recognise that there was a lot more to it than that: a long-term alienation from the EU’s strategic agenda, and a deep dissatisfaction with its opacity, unaccountability and dysfunction. Right or wrong, those are not illegimate views. We need to say this, both so that we can stop the whole world from seeing us as a country that just ticked the ‘We hate foreigners’ box; and so that immigration is not allowed to become the touchstone of any new settlement. We have to say, loudly, that is not what we just voted against.

5. On that note: I don’t want to celebrate the result. But there is undeniably something mulishly admirable about the bloody-minded Englishness of saying, sod you, we’re not going to do what we’re told. For once, the establishment has been given a damn good kicking by people whom both main parties have simply ignored for decades. In that sense: we deserved it. By all means fix the appalling damage done by last Thursday’s vote. But don’t ignore what drove it. In this sense – if only in this sense – this result is better than a 52-48 for Remain, after which the 48% would simply have carried on being ignored.

And on all these notes: stay angry, stay visible, stay vocal. This is an extraordinary moment of possibilities, some of them quite attractive, some of them truly dreadful. It can’t be allowed to drift.

Why I'm backing Donald Trump

Joking! Joking. Almost, anyway.

In some sort of extended corollary of Godwin's Law, every blogger eventually gets drawn in to the phenomenon that is Donald Trump: surely the most extraordinary event in America, if not the world, this year. But once we've overcome the incredulous outrage he generates, or at least put it to one side: what does the phenomenon mean?

That he represents a kind of backwash to Obama's America is becoming a commonplace, and no less true for that. A formerly dominant slice of American culture - white, male, relatively uneducated, relatively rural - which has been seeing both its social privileges and its economic position steadily eroded for two or three generations, has been nursing various kinds of legitimate and illegitimate anger for much of that time but has not managed to find satisfactory ways of expressing it. There have been constructive ways of doing so, and real political victories along the way, but none that have changed that underlying trajectory. Obama's election does seem to have turbocharged that anger - both by making government seem alien in a way it had not seemed to white Americans before,and by emphasising that the opposing coalition really could win. And he won by beating two of the most constructive, moderate and appealing figures Republican politics could offer, McCain and Romney - who lost partly because they had had to contort themselves out of that moderation in order to secure their party's nomination.

So it sort of makes sense that this burgeoning, nameless rage should now finally express itself in an irrational howl. It's time for a section of white America's id to be heard, and Mr Trump's remarkable skill has been to be its ventriloquist. No one else could do it this way, but in any other year he would have made no progress at all.

Most of the non-Trump world is focusing on immediate and practical questions like, how to stop him, and how, if at all, the Republican Party can rebuild itself after this eruption. But it's not generally good to respond to seismic political change by wishing it will go away and normal service will resume.

I think the key question is how to get America through this moment without suffering long-term harm - and preferably, to allow Trump to act as a sort of scapegoat or sin-eater, who can concentrate the poison of American politics in his person and take it into the wilderness with him. 

So, while I appreciate why so many Republicans want to block him at the convention (and it now looks like they may succeed), I sort of hope they fail. If he is blocked the long-term damage may be severe: a large section of the Republican Party will feel that its democratic will has been thwarted, and that if only its candidate had run it would have triumphed. It will not be reconciled to the new order. Not even if, highly implausibly, a Republican candidate who emerges from that train-wreck of a process goes on to win. This is obviously a problem for the Republican party, but it's also a problem for the republic as a whole.

Whereas a Trump candidacy which is really, thoroughly, soundly walloped in the general election could achieve what nothing else could: getting through to that agonised, disempowered chunk of the American electorate that, for good or for ill, the old days are OVER. If as stumbling and flawed an embodiment of America's ego as Hillary Clinton can beat the most fluent and articulate embodiment of its id, that should not be an experiment that anyone will want to repeat. And indeed, I would bet that in retrospect, the Trump candidacy will seem grotesque and shameful to many of those who will deny that they were ever caught up in it. With luck, Trump's electorate could start demanding that politicians of both parties actually address their problems.

It is just the tiny, tiny risk that a Trump candidacy might not end in defeat that gives me pause.