A Collection of Ranter Writings Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution
Edited by Nigel Smith
First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 This collection copyright Š Nigel Smith 2014 The right of the Nigel Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3361 8 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3360 1 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1010 2 PDF eBook Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Andrew Miller Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents Foreword Foreword to First Edition, 1983 John Carey
viii xi
Preface xiv Abbreviations xvii Introduction 1 Further Reading
32
ABIEZER COPPE
Preface to John the Divine’s Divinity (1648)
35
Some Sweet Sips, of some Spiritual Wine (1649)
36
‘An Additional and Preambular Hint’ to Richard Coppin’s Divine
Teachings (1649)
64
A Fiery Flying Roll and A Second Fiery Flying Roule (1649)
72
Letter from Coppe to Salmon and Wyke (c. April–June 1650)
108
Divine Fire-Works (1657)
109
LAURENCE CLARKSON
A Single Eye All Light, No Darkness (1650) 114
Letter from ?Clarkson to William Rawlinson (mid-July–Oct. 1650)
128
From The Lost Sheep Found (1660)
129
Anon., A JVSTJFJCATJON OF THE MAD CREW (1650) 141 JOSEPH SALMON
A Rout, A Rout (1649) 159
Divinity Anatomized (1649)
170
Letter from Salmon to Thomas Webbe (3 April, 1650)
199
Heights in Depths (1651) 200
JACOB BAUTHUMLEY
The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650)
222
Index 257 Index of Biblical References
263
viii
M
Foreword
any forms of protest necessarily foreground the cause for which they fight: better social justice, better political representation, ending gender, sexual or racial discrimination (or exploitation), protecting the environment and the climate, and of late, protecting and promoting a faith, or a version of a faith. This usually means commitment to some kind of revised social order, and along the way, protest may be linked with a utopian vision of the future. But there are other kinds of protest that refuse the above. Their force arises from such deep unhappiness with the present predicament that it is driven by a need for immediate, forceful rejection of the customs and ways of prevailing conditions because those old ways are merely a compromised way of getting by. They won’t do, and there must be an immediate noise of refusal. Ordinary life, they claim, is lived as a betrayal of another truth that is being ignored or, what‘s worse, suppressed and even cruelly denied. So the Sex Pistols and the punk revolution that they spearheaded were understood as a necessary angry deformation of the polite conventions in 1970s Britain and elsewhere that were the carapace of class oppression. For many people life in 1976 was not fun and had NO FUTURE. It had to be rejected by the brusque, grotesque denunciation of English manners and institutions that was the punk song. That’s how Greil Marcus saw matters in his widely revered Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989), 1–15, and he regarded the Ranters, notably Abiezer Coppe, as seventeenth-century predecessors of Johnny Rotten (p. 27). This was rebellion by means of a vulgar, foul-mouthed aesthetic of protest, one that has not left our culture. Punk’s exuberant anger was directed at the shallow hypocrisy of the establishment, an attitude that was bitterly sharpened by the sanctimonious politics that followed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the stiletto moment of punk protest when, early on, the four-letter F word was unsheathed on early evening TV, at a time when no one had dared do that. Quite sensational, reducing a live interview to anarchy, this infamous ‘hit’ was probably well-planned and very effective. Swearing has always been a direct way to expose moral hypocrisy. Think it no longer matters? Think Pussy Riot, and its imprisoned members, two of whom were whipped publicly in Sochi, Russia, the day before this foreword was written. Such moments were not silly pranks during those quaint days before the latest age of terror. They are in fact part of a larger, much longer history of agit-prop-style protest against the profound inadequacy of the conventional ways of doing things. Sometimes politeness is just not good enough. It may be necessary to invent an art movement in order to escape into a frame of being where life becomes more authentic and more just, and this has certainly been part of the mission of the earlier twentiety-century avant garde, or indeed the visionary poetry of Blake and Shelley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Post-punk anti-authoritarianism, witnessed in the acid house gatherings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, has a literary component in the form of poetic declamation, a new expression of freedom that aims to perpetuate the moment of protest. As Peter H. Marshall writes, ‘It fuses fact and fiction, history and myth, and opposes the primitive to the civilized. Rather than resorting
Foreword
ix
to agit-prop, it tries to politicize culture and transform it from the inside’ (Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (2010), 494). Such a move seems like deploying a creative anarchism within the heartland of mass popular culture. The Situationist movement of the mid-twentieth century believed that individual expression through directly lived experiences and the fulfillment of authentic desires had been denigrated by commodity capitalism. The solution was to use art to make moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires; everyday life was to be made liberating. Turning his attention to history, the Situationist philosopher Raoul Vaneigem regarded the ‘Free Spirit’ mysticism of the Middle Ages as an attempt by pious lay people in the past to assert a genuinely creative devotion, over and against the repressive powers of national (or international) churches and the state, powers that were at least disciplinary and at worst violent. For Vaneigem the ‘orthodox,’ sexually sterilized mysticism of the famous medieval mystics of the monastery — Meister Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, van Ruysbroeck, Groote — was ‘revenge of the spirit for attempts to emancipate the body’ by the ‘Free Spirit’ lay mystics (The Movement of the Free Spirit (1994), 91). The Ranters, he thought, seemed to have brought this sense of liberation to bear on the rigors of Calvinist discipline in mid-seventeeth-century England. The Ranters. Who flourished briefly in the middle of the seventeenth century, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the abolition of the House of Lords and the proclamation of a republic. For a short time a number of unusual individuals loudly expressed their spiritual liberty in the name of God: they swore, allegedly practiced free love, and their writings were remarkable for their candid and daring originality. God was in them, surging through them and giving their every action life and meaning. The most prominent Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, saw this way as the ultimate just fellowship: sharing everything as the Bible tells us to. Coppe’s example reminds Marcus of the wasted, noisy down and outs of Berkeley, CA (Lipstick Traces, 434–35). For a while Laurence Clarkson developed a personal cosmology that justified unbounded free love, and, although their writings seem less startling, both Joseph Salmon and Jacob Bauthumley let that God within them banish sin. They reconnected with the idea of a sustaining natural world, which is where God also lived and to which they would return at death. They re-imagined themselves as untainted, beautiful and wholly at one with their redeemer, Jesus, with whom they enjoyed a fulfilling mystical marriage. Other Ranter writings contain a theology embodied and celebrated by sexual intercourse. Orthodox theology and the social structure denied this and said people had to suffer in sin and subjection, but the Ranters had other ideas. Whatever the Ranters learned from their brief moment (they were all punished, most recanted, and moved on), those who wrote each did something extraordinary with the resources of the English language and the cultural reservoir that it had become by the mid-seventeeth century. They invert, jest, make new certainties, new rhythms (sometimes falteringly, sometimes with impressive struggle), swear, channel God, see God’s hand in the events of their world, voice angels, and speak with the freshness of people who have finally, at
x
Foreword
long, long last, come to terms with themselves. Sin is gone: I can be who I am. It is altogether a remarkable verbal architecture and why they are worth reading. The literature that is still read today from the seventeenth century is incredibly rich in its originality and its enduring value: the later Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Donne, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Milton, Marvell, Margaret Cavendish to name just a few. The Ranter writings, in their outrageous way, are right up there with them. Nigel Smith 21 February, 2014