Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures in the North of England, c. 1600-1650 Andrew Cambers D ...

480 Pages·2008·21.35 MB·English

Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures in the North of
England, c. 1600-1650
Andrew Cambers
D.Phil.
The University of York
Department of History
May 2003
Abstract
This thesis considers the uses of print and manuscript in the north of England
between about 1600 and 1650 and the impact such uses had on the beliefs of
men and women in this period. The evidence is taken from all over the north of
England, though particular attention is placed on Yorkshire, and individual
sections focus on Fewston, Hackness, Halifax, Leeds, Nidderdale and York.
I have used the methodology of the history of the book and the study of
marginal annotations to gauge the responses of early modern readers to their
books. In this respect, and in its treatment of issues of genre in analysing the
literature of the period, the thesis combines the discipline of religious history
with the study of literature. I have considered how people organised their lives
around books, which they both read and used to make sense of their world.
The thesis makes a contribution to the history of the book by adding new
discussions of individual readers to the existing scholarship and by stressing
the importance of religion to the subject as a whole. It also makes a
contribution to the study of religious cultures in general, and to godly cultures
in particular, in the early modern period. It questions assumptions historians
have made about the godly. It suggests that the divisions between the godly and
their neighbours were significant and have been seriously underestimated in
this period. Furthermore, by focusing on the range of contexts in which books
were read and the variety of uses to which they were put, it makes the case for
the diversity of a plurality of unstable godly cultures in this period.
ii
Contents
List of abbreviations and conventions Page iv
List of plates v
Acknowledgements vi
Author's Declaration vii
Introduction I

Part I: Family and Friends 40

Chapter 1 Reading (in) the Hoby household 41
Part II: Neighbours 120
Chapter 2 Performance, Providence and Urban Conflict: Ministers, 121
books and religious politics in the north of England
Part III: Enemies 190
Chapter 3 Ritual Reading: Edward Fairfax's Daemonologia and 191
the power of the book in possession cases in early
modern England
Part IV: Publics 237
Chapter 4 'A General in the library': Godly culture and the world 238
of Ferdinando Fairfax
Conclusion 304
Appendix A Lady Hoby's Annotations 314
Appendix B Ferdinando Fairfax's Funeral Sermon 367
Appendix C Ferdinando Fairfax's Library Catalogue 387
Bibliography 433
iii
List of abbreviations and conventions
Abbreviations
Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York
BI
BL British Library, London
DNB The Dictionary of National Biography
NYCRO North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton
PRO Public Record Office, London

STC A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of
Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English
Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640, 2nd edn., revised and
enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F.
Pantzer, 3 vols (London, 1976-91)
YML York Minster Library, York
Noce on the text
The original spelling and punctuation of quotations has been retained, though
the use of i and j and u and v has been modernised in citations from printed
sources. Abbreviations in manuscript sources have been silently expanded.
I have taken the year to have begun on I January throughout, though in
citations from letters and diaries 1 have given both years to avoid confusion.
iv
List of plates
Plate number and description Page
1. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes Of The Institution 88
Use And Doctrine Of The Holy Sacrament Of The
Eucharist In The Old Church (London, 1600), title-page
2. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes, p. 2 93
3. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes, p. 3 95
4. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes, p. 85 97
5. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes, p. 94 99
6. Philipe Du Plessis-Mornay, Fowre Bookes, p. 159 110
7. Matthew Sutcliffe, The supplication of certaine masse-priests 248
falsely called Catholickes (London, 1604), title-page
8. Matthew Sutcliffe, The supplication of certaine masse-priests, 256
sigs. H3v-H4r.
9. William Watts, The Swedish Intelligencer (London, 1632), 264
frontispiece and title-page.
The plates appear by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of York.
V
Acknowledgements
First I must thank Bill Shells for bcing an excellent supervisor for the last four
years. He has listened to incoherent ramblings on more occasions than I can
remember and helped me to turn (some of) them into something better. Bill and
my undergraduate teachers, especially Christopher Haigh and Susan Brigden,
have helped me develop what critical skills I possess. In more informal
situations, Wolfgang Behringer, Simon Ditchfield, Mark Jenner and Jason
Scott-Warren have helped me question my assumptions and challenge the ideas
of those scholars who have grappled with early modern religion and culture
before me. I thank them all.
I thank the Department of History for funding the research and for providing a
lively environment in which to carry it out, especially in its Research Seminars.
Fellow graduate students have made research more entertaining than it might
otherwise have been, especially: Matthew Day, Liz Evenden, Jason Nice, Ros
Oates, Matt Roberts, and Helen Smith. I must also acknowledge the great help
I have gained from the thesis of J. A. Newton, which has provided the platform
on which my discussion of northern puritanism rests.
Since much of the time spent researching was inevitably in libraries, I thank the
staff of all those libraries I have worked in who have patiently put up with my
questions about marginal annotations. I particular, I thank the staff at York
Minster Library, especially Deirdre Mortimer, and all the staff at the J. B.
Morrell Library of the University of York, especially David Griffiths for his
help with the Halifax Parish Library.
I have learnt a lot from those who have listened to and commented on parts of
this thesis in papers I have presented at the History Research Seminar, York;
meetings of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 2000 and 2002; The Religious
History of Britain Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London; the
Reformation Studies Colloquium at Exeter, 2002; the Witchcraft in Context
Conference at York, 2002; the conference on 'The Invention of Writing' at
York, 2002; and the conference on 'Defining the Holy' at Exeter, 2003.
Special mention must be made of those who have read drafts of chapters,
especially Holger Schott of Harvard University and Michelle Wolfe of Ohio
State University. Many others have provided references and I thank especially
Simon Adams, Andy Hopper, Arnold Hunt, Anthony Milton and Sue Vincent.
Finally, and most especially, I thank my parents, brothers and Alice, for
support, both emotional and financial. Alice in particular has had to listen to
the strange doings of early modern men and women and has welcomed them
and their books into our lives for so long.
vi
Author's Declaration
This thesis contains no material that has been presented before elsewhere and
its findings are not the result of joint research.
vii
Introduction
1
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, whether we like it or not,
brought religious change, which some people welcomed and accepted, others
accommodated and others reacted to. It occurred in an age of faith but was
essentially a political act of state, albeit one which had effects on many aspects
of everyday life, from the domestic and devotional to the political and public.
Those that welcomed change tended to see their new religion as a religion of
the word, the word of God, in which people participated, in contrast to the non-
participatory religion of Rome, which had been characterised by ceremony and
superstition, rite and ritual. Generations of historians, starting (perhaps) with
John Foxe, have accepted an essentially Lutheran call to faith being defined by
the word: or sofa scriptura, as Luther had put it. Alongside the move to the
word was a change from the community to the individual, the internalisation of
the word of God as the characteristic sign of those that had faith. These parallel
and connected changes have remained at the core of studies of religious change
for four hundred years. It suits the Protestant believers to see them this way,
since it is an assurance of faith, but it also suits the polemical Catholic version
of the progress of religious change, since it suits their theological standpoint to
argue that the move was an erroneous one, from corporeality and community,
to fundamentalist literalism and individual isolation, and it is an argument
sustained by an idealised view of the good old days which has proved
remarkably resilient.1
Perhaps for these reasons, it has escaped the analysis of historians (fed on a diet
of polemicists, or themselves promoting a cause) that Protestantism was a
religion of the word only to the believer. To the historian, it must be a religion
of the book, defined by the physical properties and the text of the sacred book,
Classic contrasting viewpoints are A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (211d
edn., London, 1989) and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional
Religion in England c. 1400-c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992). David Sabean,
Power In The Blood: Popular culture and village discourse in early modern Germany
(Cambridge, 1984) and R. W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany 1400-1800
ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden, 2001) challenge associations between the Reformation and
interiority. Such associations have not been challenged for England, though note the
implications in the argument of John Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 73-100. It is a major purpose of this thesis to challenge the
prevailing Collinsonian (and Weberian) argument.
2
the Bible. It is only from the book, for the historian, that the word emerges. For
the people in the seventeenth century, the book and its words were at the heart
of religious practice, from the service and the sermon at Church to prayers and
piety in the household.
This thesis is about the development of religion, in the area of personal piety
more than theology, in the north of England in the early seventeenth century.
The guiding consideration is the relationship between the uses (and reading) of
books, in particular religious books, and the development of post-Reformation
religion. The north of England is appropriate because the early Reformation
made little headway and the first serious attempt to impose Protestantism came
after about 1570 and was intimately tied up with a programme of reformed
printed publications and the development of literacy. The early seventeenth
century is a vital period in the history of England, in particular in its religion. It
was a century of vitality in a whole range of areas. A glance down the index of
a general survey indicates the range of materials cultural historians manage:
from cribbage, cricket, crime and Cromwell, to publishing, punishments,
Purcell and Puritanism.2 It is a daunting task to say something distinctive and
new about the century, which has been subject to some of the most heated of
historical debates and the most erudite of scholarship.3
However, it is spineless not to try, and my approach attempts to provide a new
approach to studies of early Stuart religion, which has been the subject of much
2 Mark Kishlansky„4 Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (London, 1996),
pp. 368, 380.
3 Classic studies, which have influenced historians of all periods and scholars in other
fields, include Laurence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965) and Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971). The debates over the causes of the
Civil War have provoked some of the most gruesome historical bloodshed. See,
Laurence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (London, 1972) and Conrad
Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990). It should be noted that
the debates have continued to rage, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of
English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987) and the pre-emptive strike of Peter
White, 'The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered', Past and Present, 101 (1983), 34-54
and Jonathan Scott, England's Troubles: Seventeenth-century English political
instability in European context (Cambridge, 2000).
3