Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: prophecy, politics and the people in late medieval and early modern England
- 1 Ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century
- 2 Prophetic creation and audience in civil war England
- 3 Prophecy and the Revolution settlement
- 4 The re-rooting and survival of ancient prophecy
- 5 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The re-rooting and survival of ancient prophecy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: prophecy, politics and the people in late medieval and early modern England
- 1 Ancient prophecy in the sixteenth century
- 2 Prophetic creation and audience in civil war England
- 3 Prophecy and the Revolution settlement
- 4 The re-rooting and survival of ancient prophecy
- 5 Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter will consider why ancient prophecy was able to survive in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at precisely the time when the modernization narratives of Thomas, Capp and others might suggest it was already effectively dismissed and marginalized, a relic of the past. Even some of those who have urged the continuities in prophetic culture after 1660 have found the later eighteenth century as a period in which it lost its force. The traditions of Merlin and Nixon will be examined to assess the thesis that particular factors lay behind their decline. In particular, however, we will address the remarkable revival of interest in Mother Shipton, the circumstances of ancient prophecy's most severe trial, the scandal surrounding Charles Hindley's forged prophecy of 1881, and the continuing legacy of political prophecy in the twentieth century.
If Nixon was recruited neatly into a new discourse of national identity in the 1750s, then the tradition faced new challenges in the 1770s. Now it was the new ‘philosophical’ and critical historiography of men such as Edward Gibbon which might be applied to Nixon's words. In 1774 a new version of the life appeared. Bearing the publisher's imprint of R. Snagg, this purported to be a return to the authentic Nixon, and the author's contempt for Oldmixon and the distortions and inaccuracies of previous historians is evident throughout. He is scornful of Oldmixon's chronology, urging (wrongly) that the Cholmondeleys only acquired Vale Royal in Charles I's reign, and therefore arguing that Oldmixon was wrong to identify James I as the king in the prophecy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England , pp. 145 - 193Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006