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Antinomians, Ceremonialists, and Judaizers: on the Margins of Puritanism?

Antinomiens, cérémonialistes et judaïsateurs : aux marges du puritanisme ?
Frédéric Herrmann

Abstracts

Following in the footsteps of Peter Lake and David Como, this paper aims to show that the first decades of the seventeenth century, deemed to be a period during which the godly “turned inwards” and worked from within the Church, also saw the emergence of underground alternative movements such as antinomianism which grew out of the puritan mainstream. The case-study of the judaizing Traskites, who exhibited unorthodox soteriological beliefs and an internalising of the moral law as well as upholding the observance of Jewish ceremonial laws, raises the question of the continuities between mainstream and radical puritanism and shows the complexities characterising the identity-formation of puritanism.

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Introduction

  • 1 Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 135.

1The repression of the Presbyterian movement in the early 1590s followed by the Hampton Court Conference (1604) are often said to have signalled the end (at least until the 1640s) of puritan ecclesiastical reform, leading in the first decades of the seventeenth century to a period of appeasement and détente thanks to moderates such as Archbishop Abbot. Those reforming puritans joined their quieter godly brethren in making their peace with the status quo. They “turned inwards”1 and worked at a reformation of manners of their own communities from within the Church, from the ground up. Their “conformable” attitude was somehow facilitated by the presence of like-minded individuals close to or within the Establishment, and by the upholding by king and church of Calvinist orthodoxy, as illustrated by the position of the English delegation to the synod of Dort in 1618-9.

  • 2 David R. Como, ‘Radical Puritanism, c. 1558-1660’ in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds.), The Cam (...)
  • 3 Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’, p. 254.

2Yet behind the quiet façade, lies a reality which was often tumultuous and tortured, with cracks appearing precisely around 1618 with the ideological tensions linked to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, the establishment of semi-separatist congregations by the likes of Henry Jacob and the Mayflower crossing (1620). However, as shown by David Como, the biggest challenge for puritanism came from the rise of antinomian voices. Those took issue with the works-based practical piety of “sanctification” developed by the godly over the previous couple of decades, with their obsession for the performance of holy duties and devotional exercises, for they were somewhat reminiscent of the old faith and therefore posed a real threat to the reformed theology of free grace.2 The criticisms levelled at the “allegedly cowardly and hypocritical professors of the godly community3 grew first in London and other places in England during the 1620s and 1630s, with such voices as John Eaton’s “inherent righteousness” and guiltlessness of the Elect, only to be reprised in New England in its own “antinomian controversy” in the late 1630s and reappropriated once again by England during the revolutionary 1640s, when politically and socially radical forms of sectarian puritanism took root.

  • 4 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1946 (...)
  • 5 Theodore D. Bozeman, ‘The Glory of the “Third Time”: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan’, Journal of Eccl (...)
  • 6  Christopher Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’ in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes (...)
  • 7 Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’, p. 243 and David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit. Puritanism and the Emerg (...)

3One major ongoing debate at least since Geoffrey Nuttall4 in the 1940s is to determine whether this radical puritanism was an evolutionary trend of puritanism itself, whether it was an attempt to obliterate puritanism (as T. D. Bozeman suggests),5 or whether it originated from an altogether different tradition (such as the Lollards, as once argued by Christopher Hill).6 David Como for his part has aimed to show that antinomianism grew out of godly networks and circles in the 1620s and 1630s, and has thus argued that it took “shape within the social matrix of the godly community”, grew out of “mainstream puritanism,” and was a “dialogue within puritanism itself.”7

  • 8 David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford, Claren (...)
  • 9 Richard H. Popkin and Matt Goldish (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European C (...)
  • 10 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998), p. 99.

4This paper follows in David Como’s footsteps and offers through a case study a modest contribution to the debate as to whether early Stuart sectarian, “radical” forms of protestant religiosity may have stemmed from the same cultural landscape as mainstream puritanism. The example chosen is one of the most extreme and “heretical” from the early seventeenth century, that of John Traske, initially a Church of England minister, who in 1618 was imprisoned for starting a movement which ostentatiously adopted judaizing ceremonial practices. At the same time, Traske and his followers expressed very clear antinomian views, hence presenting a paradoxical embracing as well as rejecting of the law, which will be deciphered in due time. He and his followers were therefore a very singular case, showing a deeply idiosyncratic religiosity, far removed from the mainstream, which at first glance seems to be completely beyond the pale of puritanism. It would perhaps be more accurate to study the “Traskites,” as they came to be known, from the perspective of the so-called “Judaizing turn” of seventeenth-century England, which was recorded a generation ago by the likes of David S. Katz8: the Hebrew revival, the eschatological hopes about locating the lost Ten Tribes of Israel and the subsequent restoration of the Jews to the land of Israel, and in the realms of philosophy and political theory, both in England and in Holland, the rise of scepticism, the consolidation of anti-trinitarianism, the dawn of Spinozian rationalism and the bold secular, redistributive understanding of the Hebrew Republic (as more recently portrayed by Eric Nelson).9 Against all odds, however, Traske’s bizarre “antinomian judaizing” seems paradoxically to have a lot more in common with the main ground of puritan godliness than our intuition first says. Consequently, it may be able to tell us much about godly piety and practices, as well as reveal, against a common backdrop of soteriological anxiety, some of the complexities of puritanism as a phenomenon, itself best described as a continuum, or as Ann Hughes put it, as a “fluid spectrum,” more so than a rigid set of fixed, homogeneous characteristics.10

The paradox of ceremonial antinomianism

  • 11 Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 20.
  • 12 Ibid., p. 13.
  • 13 Ibid., p. 28.

5As pointed out above, the case of John Traske and his followers is deeply idiosyncratic, and thus not always easy to grasp. This is partly because their beliefs and practices evolved and changed over time. Self-taught but nonetheless ordained as church minister in 1611, Traske not only rejected the liturgy and Book of Common Prayer of the established Church but also gathered around him during the 1610s a series of disciples, the most vocal representatives of whom being the autodidacts Hamlet Jackson, Returne Hebdon and his own wife Dorothy. He published several books and pamphlets, and travelled the country as a self-styled prophet from parish to parish. His converts adopted Jewish practices such as the Levitical dietary laws forbidding the consumption of blood and swine, the Second Temple rites and prohibitions “touching Meat, Drink, Apparel, Resting, Working, Building, and many other matters11; they observed the Passover seder ritual and more importantly came to observe very strictly the Saturday Sabbath12; some, like Jackson, even sought to be circumcised by Sephardi Jews in Amsterdam in the 1620s (his travelling companion, Christopher Sands, eventually opting out and preferring to remain “a Saint of [among] the Gentiles” when he saw the knife).13 In adopting Jewish rites and practices, the Traskites seemed to ignore the traditional Christian distinction between the moral, judicial, and ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, which stipulated that only the moral law remained binding on Christians whilst ceremonial and judicial laws were abrogated by the coming of Christ.

  • 14 John Traske, A Pearle for a Prince, or a Princely Pearl, As it was delivered in two sermons (London (...)
  • 15 John Traske, Christs kingdome discovered, Or, That the true Church of God is in England, clearely m (...)
  • 16 As recorded by Traske’s godly critic William Sclater in An Exposition with Notes upon the first Epi (...)

6Yet, at the same time, it is possible to locate in Traske and his followers the same reaction against godly practical piety and precisian legalism that characterized the emerging antinomian trend of the 1610s and 1620s. Traske lampooned the greed and hypocrisy of legalistic, pharisaic ministers (godly and conformist alike), “reformers of others and most irreformed themselves.”14 The Traskites also suppressed any notion of ecclesiastical oversight and discipline, and they argued that true believers were governed by the Holy Spirit – and not by the outward obligation of observing the moral law: “the only way to know that wee are in Christ is by the knowledge that yourselves are in Christ,” striving towards assurance of salvation whilst at the same time being released from the guilt of sin and sharing in the “mind of Christ.”15 This, in time, fostered a sense of self-confidence about their own election, which, in their view, made the differences between the elect and the reprobate even starker.16

  • 17 Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 149-151.
  • 18 Ibid., p. 150 and Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 26.
  • 19 J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal H (...)
  • 20 John Traske, The True Gospel Vindicated, From the Reproach of a New Gospel (n.p., 1636), sigs. A6v- (...)
  • 21 Returne Hebdon, Guide to the Godly ([London,] 1646), pp. 32-33.
  • 22 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 173.

7It is perhaps because they were self-taught that Traske and his followers placed no value on education or revealed wisdom, and steered far away from puritan Biblical literalism. As already hinted at, what they showed instead was a pneumatic religiosity, made of spiritism, visions and dreams, a piety in the ecstatic and self-prophetic mode.17 For example, Jackson was revealed the necessity to observe the Saturday “Jewish” Sabbath in a vision that he had whilst “travelling the Country on a Saturday,”18 a sort of reversal of the Damascene conversion, and he rushed to impart this new-found knowledge to Traske. The rejection of “outward things” and “formalitie,” of a “carnal” understanding of the faith because they stifled the Spirit, later became, according to Colin Davis, the most probable unifying characteristic of puritan radicalism during the Civil Wars, a trend he calls “anti-formalism.”19 In many instances, it coincided with social egalitarian tendencies. Around 1615, Traske started a one-way correspondence with the King himself, urging him to condemn “Rome and the Jesuits,” and kept addressing the monarch in the familiar “Thee” and “Thou.” James I was not in the least bit amused.20 Traske further exhibited those tendencies when for instance he explained that the commandment to love one another meant making goods common among true believers or even among the general community, for distribution to the poor. Once in prison, Hebdon wrote: “it is the judgment of the holy spirit, that whosoever is false in the common communion of goods, cannot hold the love in the holy communion of the body and blood of the Lord.”21 Such attitudes – the irreverence towards hierarchy, the “Christian communism” – would later flourish in radical groups of the 1640s and 1650s such as the Quakers and the Diggers. David Como sees in the Traskites an example of how puritanism, “a socially conservative phenomenon […] mutated into the heterodox and politically subversive strains of godly religiosity […] during the English civil wars.”22

The heresy of Judaizing

  • 23 Greene, ‘Trask in the Star-Chamber, 1619’, p. 11.

8Traske and his disciples received a very harsh punishment at the hands of the state. Traske was tried, rather unusually, not by the High Commission (which corrected doctrinal offences), but by the Star Chamber (which tried matters of sedition against the state). Charged mainly for teaching the upholding of “the ceremonial laws of Moses,” Traske was fined, whipped, pilloried, had his ears nailed to the pillory, the letter J for “Judaizer” was branded on his forehead, and he was then committed to the Fleet prison, which was but an open sewer, where he was left to starve.23 Understandably, Traske eventually recanted but he took up his “Jewish opinions” again in the 1620s, only to end his life as a Baptist, his views around the time of his death in 1635-36 being unclear.

  • 24 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 167 and p. 171.
  • 25 Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis B (...)
  • 26 See Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The trials of the chosen peoples: recent interpretations of Prot (...)

9On the face of it, the charges of outright heresy, the outlandish practices, the “manic” prophetic style and their apparent idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies place the Traskites far away from the puritan mainstream. David Como evokes a German/European mystical background as he identifies Familist elements in Traske’s complex religious mismatch (such as perfectionism, repentance before faith, the allegorizing of heaven and hell, the community of goods…), and speaks of “a distinctively godly misunderstanding of HN’s [Hendrik Niclaes’] perfectionism.”24 Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the state’s reaction to Traske’s sect that first identified a direct lineage between godliness, antinomianism and judaizing: the attempt to undermine and stigmatise is indeed more effective if the offence is amplified. Traske’s trial took place at the same time as the controversy generated by the Declaration and Book of Sports (1618), which aimed at curbing the godly “veneration” of the Sabbath day. And Traske’s Sabbatarianism may have been particularly harshly punished because of that context. Nicholas McDowell sees the trial as a piece of political theatre, a “public spectacle of state discipline,”25 as well as evidence of a growing identification of puritans with Jews in early Stuart culture. The verdict and punishment were a warning to “hotter protestants” not to go too far in their “judaizing,” which became an umbrella term for various and sometimes opposite beliefs and practices, be it godly literal scripturalism and legalistic piety or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, an antinomian heightened sense of “Jewish” election and abandonment of the obligation of the moral law (a connection between election and anti-legalism which would obviously never have been countenanced in ancient Israel). Certainly, contemporaries, including church and state, had picked up on the several affinities between puritanism and elements of Jewish religion and history. The godly had for several decades both admired and identified with the first “chosen nation” of the Old Testament, which provided a pattern for the identity of the “elect saint” within a society inhabited by the mass of the reprobates, as well as a guideline for moral commitment and ritual purity.26 Based on prophecies of the Bible such as the Book of Daniel, millenarian expectations were developed, the historical role of the Jews becoming blurred with the eschatological role that the godly had assigned themselves. Very clearly, the Crown’s fear behind such decisions as the Declaration of Sports was that those puritans who were thought to hold an unflinching belief in their own election and moral superiority could potentially challenge the authority of the state, and even turn the social order upside down. So, the association with the Jews, the ultimate figures of sedition and rebellion, is (once again) unsurprising.

  • 27 Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church (Dordrecht, 1590), p. 77 and p. 217. See also (...)
  • 28 See An Abstract of the Lawes of New England, as they are now established (London, 1641) in Tracts a (...)
  • 29 The “primitivists” in favour of reviving the judicial laws often derided the judaizing ceremonialis (...)
  • 30 John Whitgift, The Works, John Ayre (ed) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Parker Society, 18 (...)
  • 31 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, Literature, Religion, and Cultural (...)

10But even more interesting is the fact that the critics of puritans and judaizers saw no real contradiction between the latter’s antinomian impulses and their upholding of the Mosaic laws after the supersession of the Law by the Gospel. This extended to judicial as well as to ceremonial laws. The label “primitivists” is often used to refer to those who argued for the reintroduction of elements of the judicial law, such as the sixteenth-century separatist Henry Barrow,27 or later in New England, John Cotton, who had antinomian tendencies but who for a short while saw in Moses, his Judicials (also the title of his tract from 1641)28 a basis for the establishment of the judicial system of Massachusetts, before eventually moving away from the idea.29 Because of such an obsession for scriptural law, puritans were often derided as Donatists, but also as Jews. As early as 1572, Whitgift had told Cartwright, “you Judaizare, ‘play the Jew’” when the latter spoke of the binding force of the Old Testament.30 This was a double paradox, of course, since conformists themselves were criticized by puritans for their own supposed crypto-catholic ritualism and ceremonialism.31

An extension of puritan godliness?

  • 32 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3 (...)
  • 33 Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character. Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century Engl (...)
  • 34 Hebdon, Guide to the Godly, p. 7.
  • 35 Ibid., p. 7 and pp. 88-89.
  • 36 David R. Como, ‘The Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of England, and the Kingdom of Traske’ in Muriel (...)
  • 37 Ibid., p. 75.
  • 38 Ibid., p. 80.

11Were there, beyond those attempts to undermine and stigmatise, any connections between mainstream puritanism, antinomianism and judaizing? Any trace of the “internal dialogue” hinted at by Como? A place to start is to try and comprehend the nature of that paradoxical creature which is “antinomian ceremonialism.” At its very heart is a soteriological anxiety about election, what Alexandra Walsham has called a “psychological need for assurance,”32 a conscience torn between assurance of election, self-doubt, and the hatred of the permanence of sin within oneself, a never-ending existential crisis.33 Thus, in most cases, the antinomian belief in salvation by faith and grace alone did not mean a Pelagian voluntarism and minimising of sin, or a radical affirmation of the power of free will or a wholesale rejection of the moral law. It was rather more the belief that there was need for an external discipline to enforce the performance of the moral law. Discipline was internalised, it was the “indwelling of the spirit of God” within the believers, or as Hebdon puts it, “the same spirit of Jesus Christ which is in heaven [that] liveth in them.”34 As they are inhabited by Christ, the bodies of the believers are each of them “as the Arke” of the Covenant, in other words a receptacle for God’s holy law. As such, the believers were to carry out the divine will as they found it prescribed in scripture and therefore perform with the utmost discipline the ceremonial Mosaic laws as an extension of the internalised moral law.35 So, in the end, as David Como explains, “freedom from the law meant obedience to the law.”36 However, the observance of ceremonies is not a method, a way or means to gain or earn salvation but rather a sign of salvation. It was a symptom. “Perfect obedience to the Mosaic Law” meant “heavenly perfection in this life” and the next.37 But this itself was characteristic of puritanism, if not of Protestantism as a whole. As “good” Protestants, the Traskites did not believe in the efficacy of rituals and sacraments if they were taken to be merely rituals and sacraments. The laws themselves were in fact signs and evidence of election. And as such, it was a “typically Puritan attitude […] pushed to perfectionist extremes.”38 One might be tempted to say that even though they had been critical of godly piety, the Traskites ended up, on their way to self-assurance about election, keeping the same reflexes of practical religiosity.

  • 39 Aidan-Francis Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’ (PhD dissertation, (...)
  • 40 Ibid., p. 244.
  • 41 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester, (...)
  • 42 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’ in Ole Grell, Jonathan Is (...)
  • 43 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, Basic Books, 1985) and John Coffey, Exodus and Lib (...)
  • 44 Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’, p. 39.
  • 45 John Traske, Christs kingdome discovered (London, 1615), p. 15; A Pearle for a Prince, p. 10; Heave (...)
  • 46 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, Routledge, 2003), cited in Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and (...)

12In an illuminating recent study, Aiden-Francis Cottrell-Boyce thinks this only tells one half of the story of the renovation of the Jewish ceremonial laws by the Traskites and later, by individuals such as Theophilus Brabourne, Thomas Totney and groups such as the Tillamites. He sees in the judaizers a drive for separation.39 This was not so much the godly notions of the “visible church of saints” or of the “covenant” as true marks of distinction. Here the model was not the Israelite notion of “the chosen people” separated from the pagan nations but rather the small, miserable, despised, and embattled Jewish remnant after the coming of Christ. This is, as we saw earlier, precisely what conformists derided them for. But they found in the “hatred,” “persecution,” and “suffering” a real strength, the root of what could be called today an “act of reclaiming.” As Cottrell-Boyce aptly says, where critics used the libel of Judaism to “confine their antagonists in a pejorative space,” they themselves sought to “occupy that same space.”40 According to Alexandra Walsham, persecution and suffering could in fact be “immensely empowering,”41 or, as Patrick Collinson wrote “the experience of oppression, real or imagined, provided necessary evidence of election42 and the starting point of a “liberation theology.”43 An “identity of powerlessness”44 was paradoxically a source of strength. And this was, naturally, alongside exile and exodus, an experience shared by Jews and puritans alike. The impulse here was certainly one of a godly minority wishing to separate from the wicked. Jewish ceremonies perfectly fitted that purpose, be it the rejection of idolatry, the practice of the Saturday Sabbath or circumcision, in all cases the Law serving to bring assurance about one’s election and to separate the wheat from the chaff, the godly from the unregenerate; helping to achieve rectification and purification.45 Mary Douglas went as far as to say that the focus should be less on the nature of devotional practices or rituals adopted by those wishing to separate than on the act of separation and self-exclusion itself. Separation itself was the goal, regardless of the value of those practices.46

  • 47 A Pearle for a Prince is a critique of puritan pharisaism as well as a passing criticism of Anabapt (...)
  • 48 Traske, A Pearle for a Prince, p. 6.
  • 49 Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’, p. 4 and p. 13.
  • 50 Ibid., p. 139.

13Yet, like most puritans, Traske very clearly displayed anxieties about separatist ecclesiology. In fact, in his two 1615 pamphlets, he violently attacked separatist churches and paid lip service to the classic godly argument that the English Church was necessarily a true church since it nurtured true believers within its fold.47 As it turns out, Traske quickly moved on to a position of scepticism towards all types of ecclesiology, expressing his doubts about whether membership of a church could truly provide knowledge of one’s election48 – a position later held by the Seekers and the Ranters in the mid-seventeenth century. However, the difficulty to turn what Cottrell-Boyce calls a wish for “distinctiveness” and “singularity49 into a coherent proposal for separate churches (though de-facto this is what Traskite sectarianism did!) is entirely characteristic of the dual, contradictory movement within puritanism of attraction towards as well as rejection of separatism, of “separating without separating.”50

Conclusion

  • 51 Peter Lake, ‘William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the God’, Journal of Ecclesiastical (...)
  • 52 Peter Lake, ‘“A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’ in Christop (...)

14From this case-study, we could venture the idea that puritanism was a large umbrella under which many guises and incarnations may have been able to grow, like antinomian and judaizing beliefs and practices, though they all shared common traits: never-ending cycles of soteriological anxiety followed by feelings of elation about one’s election (and back again); this being closely linked to stigmatisation and suffering as empowerment; an enduring attachment to a works-based practical piety despite the constant affirmation of free grace (though not understood as a means to gain salvation but as consequence and evidence of election); and both a drive and discomfort about ecclesiastical separation. In establishing those traits, however, we may be running the risk of what Peter Lake called a “taxonomical” “shopping list” approach of trying to define what it was to be a puritan. Instead, we should be choosing a “phenomenological” approach, which recognises the fuzziness and instability of identity-formation and self-definition, through a dialogical process of exchange, interaction, and opposition between social protagonists.51 If we continue to follow Peter Lake, puritans came to understand who they were in a dialectical manner, that is to say, thanks to the oppositional, stereotyping and stigmatising logics of their enemies, who projected on to them representations of otherness.52 Here, the choices made by judaizing puritans may show the other side of the coin of that same dialogue: an active, positive pursuit of otherness through the renovation of Jewish practices. Such a pursuit aimed at fixing identities but ultimately remained as unstable as the puritan / non-puritan binary. In early modern England, mainstream puritans, antinomians, conformists and even Jesuits were all accused in turn of “playing the Jew,” precisely because the libel served one process of identity-formation or another.

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Lake, Peter, ‘“A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’ in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 145-183.

Marshall, Peter, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, Bloomsbury, 2012).

McDowell, Nicholas, ‘The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and the Book of Sports controversy’, Renaissance Studies 19, no.3 (2005), pp. 348-363.

Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic, Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2010).

Nuttall, Geoffrey F., The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1946).

Popkin, Richard H. and Goldish, Matt (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume I: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht, London, Kluwer Academic, 2001).

Rogers, Thomas, Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, The Parker Society, 1854).

Walsham, Alexandra, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006).

Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Happiness of Suffering’ in Michael Braddick and Joanna Innes (eds.), Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 45-64.

Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).

Walzer, Michael, Exodus and Revolution (New York, Basic Books, 1985).

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Notes

1 Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 135.

2 David R. Como, ‘Radical Puritanism, c. 1558-1660’ in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 249-250; Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 44 and David Hall, The Puritans. A Transatlantic History (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 163.

3 Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’, p. 254.

4 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1946).

5 Theodore D. Bozeman, ‘The Glory of the “Third Time”: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996), p. 654.

6  Christopher Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’ in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), pp. 49-68.

7 Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’, p. 243 and David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit. Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 28 & p. 31.

8 David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982).

9 Richard H. Popkin and Matt Goldish (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume I: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht, London, Kluwer Academic, 2001) and Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2010).

10 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998), p. 99.

11 Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 20.

12 Ibid., p. 13.

13 Ibid., p. 28.

14 John Traske, A Pearle for a Prince, or a Princely Pearl, As it was delivered in two sermons (London, 1615), p. 6.

15 John Traske, Christs kingdome discovered, Or, That the true Church of God is in England, clearely made manifest against all sectaries whatever (London, 1615), p. 41 and [John Traske], Heavens Joy, or Heaven Begun on Earth (London, 1616), p. 69, p. 70.

16 As recorded by Traske’s godly critic William Sclater in An Exposition with Notes upon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (London, 1619), pp. 14-31.

17 Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 149-151.

18 Ibid., p. 150 and Katz, Philo-Semitism, p. 26.

19 J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., 3 (1993), pp. 265-288.

20 John Traske, The True Gospel Vindicated, From the Reproach of a New Gospel (n.p., 1636), sigs. A6v-A8r. See also ‘The Examination of John Pecke’, National Library of Scotland, MS Adv. 33.1.6, vol. 20, f. 60r., in Mark Bland (ed.), A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (London, Wiley, 2010), p. 198 and Charles Greene, ‘Trask in the Star-Chamber, 1619’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society 5 (1916-17), pp. 8-14.

21 Returne Hebdon, Guide to the Godly ([London,] 1646), pp. 32-33.

22 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 173.

23 Greene, ‘Trask in the Star-Chamber, 1619’, p. 11.

24 Como, Blown by the Spirit, p. 167 and p. 171.

25 Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and the Book of Sports controversy’, Renaissance Studies 19, n°3 (2005), pp. 348-363. See also David S. Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden, Brill, 1987), p. 12.

26 See Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The trials of the chosen peoples: recent interpretations of Protestantism and national identity in Briton and Ireland’ in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity, Britain and Ireland, c. 1650 – c. 1850 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 8 and Claire Jowitt, ‘Radical Identities? Native Americans, Jews, and the English Commonwealth’ in Siân Jones, Tony Kushner and Sarah Pearce (eds.), Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt. Studies in Jewish-Non-Jewish Relations (London, Vallentine Mitchell, 1997), p. 158.

27 Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church (Dordrecht, 1590), p. 77 and p. 217. See also Thomas Rogers, Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, The Parker Society, 1854), p. 90.

28 See An Abstract of the Lawes of New England, as they are now established (London, 1641) in Tracts and Other Papers, relating principally to the Origin, Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in North America (Washington, Force, 1844), vol. 3, n°9.

29 The “primitivists” in favour of reviving the judicial laws often derided the judaizing ceremonialists and sought for the authority for doing so in Aquinas, for example: the ceremonial laws were “not only dead but deadly.” In a move typical of that era, throwing the accusation of heresy on somebody else is a way to shake it off from oneself. The same mechanism is to be observed between the godly and their critics, be they antinomians or conformists. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II:I, Question 104, Article 3.

30 John Whitgift, The Works, John Ayre (ed) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Parker Society, 1851), vol. I, p. 271.

31 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 32.

32 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 305.

33 Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character. Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989), p. 21 and p. 24; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism, the structure of a Prejudice’ in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2000), p. 80; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain. Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 51 and Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Happiness of Suffering’ in Michael Braddick and Joanna Innes (eds.), Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 56 and p. 58.

34 Hebdon, Guide to the Godly, p. 7.

35 Ibid., p. 7 and pp. 88-89.

36 David R. Como, ‘The Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of England, and the Kingdom of Traske’ in Muriel McClendon, Joseph P. Ward and Michael MacDonald (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 76.

37 Ibid., p. 75.

38 Ibid., p. 80.

39 Aidan-Francis Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’ (PhD dissertation, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 2018).

40 Ibid., p. 244.

41 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 212.

42 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’ in Ole Grell, Jonathan Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 56.

43 Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, Basic Books, 1985) and John Coffey, Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014).

44 Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’, p. 39.

45 John Traske, Christs kingdome discovered (London, 1615), p. 15; A Pearle for a Prince, p. 10; Heavens Joy, pp. 54-55 and p. 136, and Hebdon, Guide to the Godly, p. 60. See Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, pp. 32-33.

46 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, Routledge, 2003), cited in Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’, p. 250.

47 A Pearle for a Prince is a critique of puritan pharisaism as well as a passing criticism of Anabaptism; Christs Kingdom Discovered uses the non-separating puritan argument against the separatists of the English Church as a true church just mentioned above, see for example p. 42. See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 77-92.

48 Traske, A Pearle for a Prince, p. 6.

49 Cottrell-Boyce, ‘Judaizing and Singularity in England, 1618-1667’, p. 4 and p. 13.

50 Ibid., p. 139.

51 Peter Lake, ‘William Bradshaw, Antichrist and the Community of the God’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 4 (1985), pp. 570-589.

52 Peter Lake, ‘“A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’ in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 145-183; ‘Anti-Puritanism, the structure of a Prejudice’, pp. 86-87.

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References

Electronic reference

Frédéric Herrmann, Antinomians, Ceremonialists, and Judaizers: on the Margins of Puritanism?Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVII-3 | 2022, Online since 04 January 2023, connection on 18 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/9877; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.9877

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About the author

Frédéric Herrmann

UMR 5206 Triangle, Université Lumière Lyon 2

Frédéric Herrmann is Associate Professor at Lyon 2 Lumière University. His PhD (2005) was on the political uses of the ancient model of Israel and on the history of the Jewish people in the polemical debates of the 1640s and 1650s in England, and he has since published extensively about sectarian puritanism, republicanism, and the revolution of 1688.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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