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The ‘Wonders in the Deep’ and the ‘Mighty Tempest of the Sea’: Nature, Providence and English Seafarers’ Piety, c. 1580–1640*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Sarah Parsons
Sarah Parsons*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

The religious beliefs of seafarers have not received a great deal of attention over the years. Contemporaries of early modern English seafarers stereotyped them as superstitious and irreligious, prone to turning to God only in times of danger. The Puritan William Perkins preached about ‘the Mariner, who is onely good in a storme’. The association of seafarers, irreligion and superstition was also reflected in popular literature. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Qveene, wrote of ‘the glad merchant, that does vew from ground / His ship far come from watrie wildernesse, / He hurles out vowes, and Neptune oft doth blesse’. These stereotypes have coloured the historiography of maritime religion, which has drawn a division between ‘superstition’ and religion in seafaring culture. However, recent work on religion and provi-dentialism on land shows this to be a faulty paradigm.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 194 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to my supervisors, Professors Alexandra Walsham and N. A. M. Rodger, and to the Editors of Studies in Church History for their comments on this article. I also wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generosity in funding my research.

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