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Doubt, Anxiety and Protestant Epistolary Counselling: The Letter-Book of Nehemiah Wallington
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2016
Abstract
This essay focuses on a surprisingly underexplored manuscript of the London puritan woodturner, Nehemiah Wallington. His ‘Coppies of profitable and comfortable letters’ anthologizes printed correspondence of martyrs and Reformed clergy alongside Wallington's own pious exchanges with ministers, neighbours and friends. Since Wallington's agonies of doubt about his religious estate are well known to early modern historians, his piety provides a particularly valuable lens through which to explore how clergymen and laypeople attempted to address the pastoral obstacle of religious uncertainty. This remarkable manuscript provides insights into clerical status within puritan spirituality, shedding light on the role of Protestant ministers as physicians of the soul, who conceived of themselves as indispensable experts in the diagnosis and cure of the spiritual afflictions of their lay devotees. Wallington and others, seeking resolutions for their doubts and scruples, affirmed the particular authority of these clergy as pastoral specialists. This essay presents evidence of sustained clericalism within Protestant piety, a tendency which acted in tension with a concurrent trend of spiritual individualism. Furthermore, it advances an argument for the significant role which epistolary counselling played in Protestant pastoral ministry to those afflicted by religious doubt.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 298 - 314
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016
Footnotes
I would like to thank Judith Maltby and Sarah Apetrei for their helpful comments on this essay; I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
References
1 Four are in the British Library: MS Sloane 1457, ‘A Memoriall of Gods judgments upon Sabbath breakers, Drunkerds and other vile livers’; MS Sloane 922, ‘Coppies of profitable and comfortable letters’; Add. MS 21935, ‘A Bundel of Marcys’; Add. MS 40883, ‘The groth of a Christian’. The remaining three are: London, Guildhall Library, MS 204, ‘Record of Gods Marcys, or a Thankfull Remembrance’; Cheshire, Tatton Park, MS 68.20, ‘A Record of marcys continued or yet God is good to Israel'; Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.436, ‘An Extract of the passages of my life or the Booke of all my writting [sic] books’.
2 Booy, David, ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654: A Selection (Aldershot, 2007), 1–28Google Scholar, at 19–20, 24.
3 See Cambers, Andrew, ‘Reading, the Godly and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 796–825CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, J. C., ‘Living with the Living God: Radical Religion and the English Revolution’, in Durston, Christopher and Maltby, Judith, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), 19–41Google Scholar, at 31–5.
4 Amongst many, see Narveson, Kate, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Farnham, 2012), 94Google Scholar–5, 97, 104–6, 115–21; Amelang, James S., The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA, 1998), 34Google Scholar–5; Doran, Susan and Durston, Christopher, Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1500–1700, 2nd edn (London, 2003), 97Google Scholar–8; Archer, Ian W., ‘Religious Identities’, in Gossett, Suzanne, ed., Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge, 2011), 135Google Scholar–43, at 137–8. A strong emphasis on individualism remains characteristic of broad overview treatments such as Forgeng, Jeffrey L., Daily Life in Stuart England (Westport, CT, 2007), 230Google Scholar–1.
5 Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Booy, ed., Notebooks, 12–14. Booy has even reproduced twelve of Wallington's own letters in his abridged edition of the notebooks.
6 Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke, 2012), 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar–9. This material is reproduced in idem, ‘Early Modern Letter-Books, Miscellanies, and the Reading and Reception of Scribally Copied Letters’, in Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, eds, Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2014), 57–72, at 65–6. The most recent large-scale assessment of Wallington's writings makes no reference to correspondence: Robert M. Oswald, ‘Death, Piety and Social Engagement in the Life of the Seventeenth-Century London Artisan, Nehemiah Wallington’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012).
7 Collinson, Patrick, ‘A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of Godly Master Dering’, in idem, ed., Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), 289–324Google Scholar, at 290.
8 Ibid. 294–8, 316.
9 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 27r–30v, at 27v, 29r.
10 Ibid., fol. 29v.
11 Dering, Edward, M. Derings Workes: More at Large then Euer Hath Heere to-fore Been Printed in Any One Volume (London, 1614Google Scholar), sig. A3v. Here Dering probably alludes to 1 Cor. 3: 5.
12 Collinson, ‘Mirror’, 299.
13 Parker, T. H. L., Calvin's Preaching (Edinburgh, 1992), 41Google Scholar–4.
14 Jason Yiannikkou, ‘Protestantism, Puritanism and Practical Divinity in England, c.1570–1620’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1999), especially 42–3, 48, 51.
15 Dering, Edward, Certaine Godly and Verie Comfortable Letters, Full of Christian Consolation (Middelburgh, 1590)Google Scholar, sig. C8r.
16 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 28v.
17 Primus, John H., Richard Greenham: Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor (Macon, GA, 1998), 12Google Scholar, 24, 42–3.
18 Holland, Elizabeth, ‘To the High and Mightie Monarch, James’, in Greenham, Richard, The Works of the Reuerend and Faithfull Seruant of Iesus Christ M. Richard Greenham (London, 1612)Google Scholar, unpaginated.
19 Henry Holland, ‘Preface to the Reader’, in Greenham, Works, unpaginated. The word ‘empiric’ refers here to an unqualified medical practitioner who rebuffs formal learning and theory: OED Online, s.v. ‘empiric, n. and adj.’, online edn (March 2014), at: <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/61340?redirectedFrom=empiric#eid>, accessed 20 March 2014.
20 Primus, Richard Greenham, 9–11; Parker, Kenneth L. and Carlson, Eric Josef, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998), 34Google Scholar–5.
21 The letters were frequently reproduced in partial collections of Greenham's works and other anthologies: Parker and Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’, 362–6.
22 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 31r; Greenham, Richard, Short Rules Sent by Maister Richard Greenham (London, 1612)Google Scholar.
23 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 31r; Clarke, Samuel, The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines (London, 1677), 14Google Scholar.
24 Bruhn, Karen, ‘“Sinne Unfoulded”: Time, Election, and Disbelief among the Godly in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England’, ChH 77 (2008), 574Google Scholar–95, at 592–3.
25 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 32v, 31v, 33r.
26 Greenham, Works, 871–80, at 877.
27 Ibid. 876–7.
28 Ibid. 877–8 (my emphasis).
29 McCabe, Richard A., Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982), 151Google Scholar.
30 Kinloch, T. F., The Life and Works of Joseph Hall, 1574–1656 (London, 1951), 191Google Scholar. It is important to observe that these carefully crafted epistles were very probably composed with publication in mind. Hall presumably always intended them to speak to a wider audience than merely their original addressees: see Huntley, Frank Livingstone, Bishop Joseph Hall, 1574–1656: A Biographical and Critical Study (Cambridge, 1979), 67Google Scholar.
31 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 106r, 142r–144r; idem, ‘The groth of a Christian’, fol. 24v; idem, ‘A Bundel of Marcys’, fols 9v, 39v.
32 Stewart, Alan, ‘Letters’, in Hadfield, Andrew, ed., The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), 417Google Scholar–33, at 426.
33 Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall explains Himself’, EHR 111 (1996), 856CrossRefGoogle Scholar–81, at 862.
34 McCabe has suggested that certain letters might owe a debt to the methods of Greenham: Joseph Hall, 210.
35 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 44r–v.
36 Ibid., fols 38r–39v, at 38r.
37 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.3.83 (19), ‘A letter of Thomas Gataker to a friend concerning his spiritual state’, 6, 11.
38 Hall, Joseph, Epistles, The Second Volume: Conteining Two Decads (London, 1608), 201Google Scholar–2. Epistolary counsel was especially fitting when contagious disease prevented the minister's personal presence.
39 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 50r–51v.
40 Although the details surrounding this event have been variously reported, an article by Andrew Atherstone has cleared up much confusion: ‘The Silencing of Paul Baynes and Thomas Taylor, Puritan Lecturers at Cambridge’, Notes and Queries 54 (2007), 386–9. One letter in the collection makes reference to this ‘great businesse’, with Baynes reporting that he had been ‘warned to preach' at the upcoming ‘Metropolitans visitation’: Baynes, Paul, Christian Letters: of Mr. Paul Bayne. Replenished with Diuers Consolations, Exhortations, and Directions (London, 1620Google Scholar), sig. G2v.
41 Ibid., fols A3v–4r.
42 Clarke, Lives, 23–4.
43 Baynes, Christian Letters, sig. F11r.
44 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 64r–65r.
45 A symbol consisting of a pointing hand 
, used to identify passages of interest or importance.
46 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 58v–63v, especially 60v–61r.
47 Ibid., fols 54r, 59r, 62r, 63v, 67r–68v.
48 Ibid., fols 54r, 57r; see also, for example, Greenham, Works, 794; Baynes, Paul, An Entire Commentary vpon the Whole Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians (London, 1643), 394Google Scholar. See Harley, David, ‘Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560–1640’, in Grell, Ole Peter and Cunningham, Andrew, eds, Medicine and the Reformation (London, 1993), 101Google Scholar–17, at 109–10.
49 Paul, Baynes, A Commentarie vpon the First and Second Chapters of Saint Paul to the Colossians (London, 1635), 143Google Scholar.
50 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 54v.
51 Ibid., fols 57v–58r; see also Baynes, Christian Letters, sig. B8r–v.
52 O'Day, Rosemary, The English Clergy: The Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession, 1558–1642 (Leicester, 1979), 126Google Scholar.
53 Daybell, Material Letter, 208.
54 See, for instance, Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 107r, 121r, 139r–v, 144v–145r.
55 Ibid., fols 148r–v, 160r–162v.
56 Ibid., fols 134v, 148r, 155r, 160r; Seaver, Wallington's World, 145–6.
57 For example, Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 137v.
58 Greenham, Works, 871.
59 Wallington, ‘The groth of a Christian’, fols 169r, 172r–v; Booy, ed., Notebooks, 336.
60 Seaver, Wallington's World, 187–8; Booy, ed., Notebooks, 17–20.
61 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 75r–v, cf. 79r, 82r–83r.
62 Ibid., fol. 83r–v.
63 Ibid., fols 80v, 76r.
64 Narveson, Bible Readers, 119.
65 Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fol. 118r.
66 Ibid., fols 118r–119v.
67 Ibid., fols 122r–123r.
68 Seaver, Wallington's World, 105.
69 See the analogous epistolary request from Hall's sister and Baynes's offer to diagnose a correspondent in this way: Wallington, ‘Coppies’, fols 38r–39v, 57v–58r.
70 Schneider, Gary, ‘Introduction’, in Dunan-Page, Anne and Prunier, Clotilde, eds, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800 (Dordrecht, 2013), 1–15Google Scholar, at 11–12.
71 O'Day, The English Clergy; eadem, The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450–1800: Servants of the Commonweal (Harlow, 2000), 50–110. See critiques in Hawkins, Michael, ‘Ambiguity and Contradiction in the “rise of professionalism”: The English Clergy, 1570–1730’, in The First Modern Society: Essays on English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. Beier, A. L., Cannadine, David and Rosenheim, James M. (Cambridge, 1989), 241Google Scholar–69; Morgan, John, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1988), 79–81Google Scholar.