'Varieties of Dissenting Expression': a one-day conference

Yesterday, I attended the one-day 'Varieties of Dissenting Expression' conference at Dr Williams's Library in London! I had the pleasure of spending the day there with one of my Ph.D supervisors, Dr Rachel Adcock (@RachelCAdcock if you are on Twitter!). The day was organised by the Centre for the English-Speaking World of Aix-Marseille Université in association with the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies and the University of Liverpool.

The conference focused on the forms of dissenting expression available to dissenters and their congregations, both in England and in America, throughout the seventeenth century. Within this remit, it also looked at how the written materials available to dissenting communities and congregations were intimately related to their religious and social experiences.

It was a conference packed with a great variety of papers given by scholars from many different areas of academia: several covered the usefulness of the contents of Church Record books to researchers; others examined the transition of these records into the digital age; and another looked at the relationship between poetry, politics and dissenting experience. Anyone who knows my research interests will immediately be able to tell that this last paper was the one I was most excited about!

That said, the talk from Margaret Bendroth (Executive Director of the Congregational Library, Boston, MA) and James F. Cooper (who also does work with this library) was fascinating. Their intention is to recover the church records of congregations across America, and to be able to provide digitized versions of them both to researchers, and to those who are just curious to explore their religious heritage. The website for the library is a veritable treasure trove for researchers so, if you are at all interested in religious writing, and especially that relating to dissent or congregationalists, then I urge you to go and explore: http://www.congregationallibrary.org/. I for one will definitely be returning to this website, and am very tempted to look into the possibility of doing some transcription of the church records: watch this space! Both Peggy and Jeff (as they are commonly known!) were wonderful speakers, and have inspired me to seriously take note of this oft-neglected avenue of research. Just because a resource is not 'literary' in the strictest sense, does not mean that it will be of no use to us!

The final paper that Rachel and I were able to go to was George Southcombe's wonderful talk on 'Poetry, Politics and Dissenting Experience'. Throughout my studies, any non-conformist poetry that I have come across, or paid significant attention to, has tended to be that of the libertines. Whilst this poetry is certainly worthy of our attention, I was excited by several new names that George's paper brought to my attention, including Robert Wild and Benjamin Keach (if I had heard of these men before, I had definitely forgotten...). So, apart from opening my eyes to an area of poetry that I have definitely neglected until now, George's paper reminded me of the need to always see the poetry of dissenters as participating in a much broader early-modern culture. In other words, the fact that they, like other 'conformist' writers, used the poetry of their predecessors such as Milton and Dryden for their specific political purposes, should mean that we read their work within the broader context of seventeenth-century poetry. A valuable point to bear in mind!

All in all, the day was a brilliant one (despite the 4.30am start!), and has really ignited my passion for research once again. I don't know about all of you, but I find going to stimulating conferences like this one always reminds me of the reasons why I love what I do.

If you are curious about the other things that the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies has to offer, do have a look at their website: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/

Psalms in your pocket

First of all, I would just like to apologise for the lack of posts from me over the last 5 weeks or so. As some of you may know, I started my MA this October and unfortunately my deadlines rather got in the way of me being able to blog! Things settle down now for a couple of weeks, though, so I will do my best to make up for it.

This is just a quick post on an App that I happened to hear about via an academic discussion list that I thought some of you might be interested in / amused to hear about. Now, whilst I know that the idea of carrying a Psalm book around in your pocket is by no means a new idea (given the manner in which the book itself was usually published), someone has brought the Bay Psalm Book kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century by making an App!

The App is free to download, and you can either get to a Psalm by selecting your current mood (yes, really!), or you can just shake your iPhone to be given a random Psalm. There is also a short piece on the history of the Bay Psalm Book. I'm by no means suggesting that this is a new scholarly resource, but it is rather fun!

This is the link to the App, although you can just search 'Bay Psalm Book' in the App Store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baypsalmbook/id733258140

Photo courtesy of BBC website

© Jenna Townend 2013

Tracing a transfiguration of death in seventeenth-century religious literature

The central focus of my dissertation's final chapter was on how two of George Herbert's poems ('Death' and 'Heaven') could have succeeded in dispelling mortal fear in his aged Christian reader by presenting death as a transcendent event to be welcomed, rather than something to be feared. Of course, this transfiguration in attitude is aligned with the progression in the presentation of death seen across the Old and New Testaments. Here, death is transformed from a finite event in which the body is simply recommitted to the dust from which it was created (Genesis 3:19, and see also 'The Order for the Burial of the Dead' in John Booty's edition of the 1599 Book of Common Prayer), to its position in the New Testament as a transcendent event for the Christian soul that, according to Scripture, was provided by Christ's self-sacrifice and the resulting doctrine of soteriology.

One of the most interesting things that I observed when looking at Herbert's 'Death' (which I have reproduced below from Helen Wilcox's edition), is how the poem follows this Biblical chronology of transforming death into a positive event. In relation to this, it also constructs a powerful pictorial representation of death's transfiguration by drawing upon its personified form as a skeletal figure that was seen in the meditatio mortis tradition of the Renaissance. In Herbert’s poem, the figure of death is gradually transformed from being the fear-inducing figure of this artistic tradition, where it is 'nothing but bones', to a figure that, 'since our Saviors death', is 'clad' with 'beauty' and can be 'much sought for as a good'.

When researching other primary sources which support or echo this transfiguration that Herbert enacts, I came across a fascinating source entitled Death's Universall Summons (EEBO) published in 1650. Whilst obviously published some time after Herbert's death in 1633, this anonymous work presents a discourse between 'the great Messenger of Mortality' and 'a presumptious Sinner', and it concludes with this man's 'chearful Entertainment of Death' (p. 1). Apart from a similar transfiguration of a Christian individual's attitude to death, what also struck me was this illustration included on the pamphlet's title page:

I would suggest that this skeletal figure (who is certainly an allusion to the meditatio mortis tradition seen in Renaissance art such as Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors) is very similar to the terrifying figure that Herbert alludes to in the first half of his poem. Furthermore, like the conclusion of Herbert's poem where his speaker welcomes death 'as a good', this dialogue also concludes with the Sinner confidently stating that 'my Friend [Death] I do Embrace' (p. 8). Because of Christ's own transfiguration of death, the Sinner has realised that the Christian can, in the spiritual and physical sense respectively, 'go Live for-ever, yet for-ever Die!' (p. 7) by greeting this personified figure of death.

I was so excited when I came across this obscure pamphlet in my research around Herbert's poem, and I'd love to hear if anyone else has found any other similar transfigurations of death in some of the more obscure religious literature of the seventeenth-century (whether poetic or otherwise!).

‘Death’

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,

                           Nothing but bones,

      The sad effect of sadder groans:

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

For we considered thee as at some six

                           Or ten years hence,

      After the loss of life and sense,

Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.

We looked on this side of thee, shooting short;

                         Where we did find

      The shells of fledge souls left behind,

Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Savior’s death did put some blood

                           Into thy face,

      Thou art grown fair and full of grace,

Much in request, much sought for as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,

                           As at Doomsday;

      When souls shall wear their new array,

And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust

                           Half that we have

      Unto an honest faithful grave;

Making our pillows either down, or dust.

• George Herbert, ‘Death’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. by Wilcox, p. 648. 
• Death's Universall Summons: or, A General Call; to all Mankind, to the Grave: in a Dialogue Betwixt a Presumptious Sinner, and the Great Messenger of Mortality (London: [n. pub.], 1650), in EEBO.
• The Book of Common Prayer: 1559 The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. by John E. Booty.

© Jenna Townend 2013