“[L]ord, thou keepest us at uncertaintyes that our hope might be in thee”: Providence and nonconformist Restoration literature

Thesis

This dissertation studies the nonconformist reassessment of how to think about providence, as seen in the literary publications of religious nonconformists in England during the Restoration period (1660–1687). The thesis challenges the idea that Restoration nonconformity was either insular and defeated or furtively radical, arguing that dissenters remained active through print culture but primarily for reasons of faith. This study finds nonconformists to be heterogeneous in loyalties, beliefs, experiences, and expectations. Yet, remarkably, these individuals respond to the Restoration moment by asking very similar questions about providence. Though they come to various conclusions, they share a hermeneutical humility and openness which make them reluctant to be determinist about providence’s ways and willing to engage with opposing voices. Accordingly, this dissertation challenges the critical binaries of loyalist and dissident, conformist and nonconformist, and includes John Dryden as an unexpected foil and mirror to Restoration dissenters. The Poet Laureate’s inclusion demonstrates the widespread relevance of nonconformists’ questions about providence.

Chapter 1 reads Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667) as representative of the Stuart regime’s politics of peace, which dissenting providentialism resisted, and The Hind and the Panther (1687) as aligned with nonconformists’ revised providentialism. This chapter establishes the pivotal moments and ideologies that bookend the dissertation’s dates. Chapter 2 explores how Milton’s 1671 Poems processes through scripture, as well as radical nonconformist beliefs about providence, in order to model to the reader their need to scrutinize and test ideas and beliefs to interpret aright. Chapter 3 examines the strained but symbiotic relationship between political loyalty and providence in Bunyan’s conversion narratives, Grace Abounding (1666) and The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684). Chapter 4 studies the new, nonconformist reluctance to determine providential value on the basis of political loyalties in Hutchinson’s biblical epic Order and Disorder (1679). Chapter 5 reads Baxter’s Poetical Fragments (1681) as a simulacrum of its author’s proposed, providential means to peace within the Restoration Church.

Authors: Campbell, SO

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nb7o000m8
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: religion and the imagination; providential hermeneutics; Literature of dissent; Annus Mirabilis; Lucy Hutchinson; Restoration nonconformity; The Hind and the Panther; The Pilgrim's Progress; faith and politics; seventeenth-century hymnody; Poetical Fragments; Order and Disorder; 1671 Poems; John Milton; Early Modern providentialism; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; John Bunyan
• Subjects: Providence and government of God; Religion in literature; Imagination--Religious aspects--Christianity; Dissenting opinions; Politics and literature