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19 - Non-conformist voices and books

from LITERARY CANONS

By
Nigel Smith
Edited by
John Barnard  and
D. F. McKenzie
With
Maureen Bell
Nigel Smith
Affiliation:
Princeton University
John Barnard
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
D. F. McKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Maureen Bell
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

this persecuted means of unlicenced Printing hath done more good to the people, then all the bloodie wars; the one tending to rid us quite of all slavery; but the other onely to rid us of one, and involve us into another. Richard Overton, A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations (1646).

Captain Lieutenant William Bray (fl. 1647–59) is in many ways typical of the people who wrote the books that are the concern of this chapter. He is obscure: there is little we know in any detail about his life, and he only comes to our attention because he was visible in a volatile public context for a brief period of time. We have to work by inference from his writings to glean anything of substance concerning his background and the general conditions under which he lived. He served as a junior officer in the New Model Army and it would seem from his first published writings that he was immersed in the culture of godliness that so many who fought for the Parliament knew: intense Bible reading within unofficially sanctioned (and hence, before 1640 and after 1660, illegal) communities of believers. He would have known about hours and hours of prayer meetings and meetings of lay people during which the interpretation of scripture was disputed. He had a historical understanding of these godly practices that extended back into the sixteenth century, and his words are suffused with dense, seemingly spontaneously delivered millenarian terms. He wrote because he had been imprisoned on account of his sympathy with the Levellers–the popular, near-democratic movement that resisted the power of the New Model Army commanders (and their associates in Parliament) in the late 1640s.

Keywords

Quaker tractsrestoration dissentnon-conformist booksMarprelate tractsnon-conformist voices
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, pp. 410 - 430
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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