This article illustrates the workings of one of the dominant academic, religious and socio-political networks in early seventeenth-century England. Throughout its various stages of compilation, Trinity College (MS B.14.22) was associated with a group of anti-Calvinist divines which included Lancelot Andrewes, Matthew Wren, John Cosin and Francis White. This excellent article argues for the importance of manuscript culture to the construction of anti-Calvinist orthodoxy. It surely presupposes an hostile reaction to the regnant, dominant, and prevailing theology throughout the Church of England, Reformed theology and Calvinism, the "doctrinal consensus" of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church...until the Anglican disasters arose, most notably, "Uncle Billy" William Laud.We will draft some comments on various quotes from this stellar piece of scholarship.
Ettenhuber, Katrin. "‘The best help God's people have’: Manuscript Culture and the Construction of Anti-Calvinist Communities in Seventeenth-Century England." Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2 (October 2007): 260-282. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 14, 2010).
The great anti-Calvinist, William Laud, puts the kibosh--the censorial kibosh--on the reigning and regnant Calvinism in England (Anglican and non-Conformist)."In 1636, the godly minister John Vicars lamented the adverse effects of censorship on the publication of Calvinist works on predestination: ‘Manuscripts are now the best help God’s people have to vindicate the truth, printing being nowadays prohibited to them, especially if their writings have any least tang or tincture of opposition to Arminianism yea or even to popery itself.’"1
Peter McCullough's contribution to the discussion of the anti-Calvinism of Laud, Andrewes, Wren and Cosin.
"McCullough’s work marks a vital contribution to recent historiographical debates about the rise of anti-Calvinism because it offers an innovative approach for discussing the textual politics of the 1620s and 1630s."
Laud controls licensures for publications by royal assent and attacks Reformed Theology.
"What emerges from this brief survey of recent historical work is an image of anti-Calvinism as shaped by print, a flexible ideological and cultural currency that affects the promulgation of policy at almost every level. This involves the exploitation of print as a symbol of authority and, often, royal favour; activating the bureaucratic mechanisms of positive and negative censorship; making the best use of an increasingly sophisticated technological medium;
and capitalising on the paratextual resources of the printed artefact. It does, in short, appear to confirm the suspicions articulated by John Vicars at the beginning of this article: the anti-Calvinist movement owes much of its success to a comprehensive control of the printing and licensing industry, while the godly minority, confined to the limited possibilities of manuscript publication, is relegated to the margins of the political and religious scene. Yet the boundaries between these two media were not, in fact, as unpermeable as Vicars’s statement might suggest. As recent scholarship has shown, despite the manifest impact of anti-Calvinist censorship on the output of puritan writings from the mid-1620s onwards, godly divines such as Ussher and Ward managed to shepherd a significant number of works through the printing
press.13 At the other end of the spectrum, as I will go on to argue, there is significant evidence to suggest that anti-Calvinist circles made extensive and sophisticated use of manuscript circulation, not just during Charles’s reign, but throughout the 1620s, when the circle of clerics patronised by Lancelot Andrewes first gained in influence, and the 1640s, at a time when the anti-Calvinist vision of the church was falling apart."
The invasion of anti-Calvinistic Anglicanism and censorship-printing controls includes Lancelot Andrewes and Matthew Wren."My case study in this project is a manuscript miscellany now located in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.14.22, a collection of sermons, tracts and poems. It charts and links two generations of anti-Calvinist thinking, spanning the avant-garde conformity of Lancelot Andrewes, for whom the volume was initially compiled around 1620, and the uncompromising ceremonialism of the Bishop of Norwich and Ely, Matthew Wren, to whose needs it was adjusted in the late 1630s (and in whose possession it probably remained until the 1660s)."
King James does theology by geo-political exegesis rather than biblical exegesis (BTW, Calvinistic Anglicans did not miss this...a dominant Calvinism still prevailed...this also did little to quell legitimate protests of non-conforming Calvinists).
As Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake have shown, the King’s commitment to the Spanish match lead to ‘the resurgence of radical Puritanism’; in the face of this criticism, James ‘was driven toward those divines whose theology allowed them to endorse his foreign policy’.38 One result of this development was a series of court appointments between 1618 and 1621 that clearly favoured anti-Calvinist divines. George Montaigne succeeded the Calvinist John King as Bishop of London, while William Laud received the bishopric of St. David’s.
Once upon a time in America, there really was a Reformed Episcopal Church, but it has--under some modern Lauds--done what Laud did of old. The English Reformed Church no longer exists, thanks to Bishop Laud Leo, Bishop Laud Ray and the other REC-lackey, boot-lickers. P.266
Andrewes’s appointment to Winchester is seen as initiating the institutional consolidation of anti-Calvinist churchmanship – an auspicious beginning to a long lineof anticipated successes. The next sermon in the miscellany, preached Easter 1620, reiterates the importance of church ceremonies, rejecting the Calvinist emphasis on the primacy of the word: ‘For, many words He [Christ] spake to them, and they felt them warme at their hearts, but, knew Him not for all that. But, He was knowen to them in the breaking of the bread.’39
Andrewes, like Laud, uses the "preferrment" system for advancement--wink, wink, Calvinists, um, "to the back of the bus please." P.267. Sounds like our times. P.266.
"Andrewes’s alma mater, the University of Cambridge, where he sought to identify the most ‘hopefull young men’ in ‘Pembrooke Hall,...Saint Peters Colledge, and...in Jesus Colledge.’"40 One such ‘hopefull and towardly young wit’ may have been John Cosin, the future Master of Peterhouse and Bishop of Durham, who was headhunted by Andrewes to look after his London library shortly after graduating BA in 1614.
Wren, another Arminian, profits from Andrewes' system of preferrments. P. 267.
"Matthew Wren was another ambitious young cleric who profited from Andrewes’s generosity. As his eighteenth-century biographer records, from the earliest days of his career at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to the significant clerical and administrative appointments in the mid-1620s, Wren was guided by the charity and good will of his patron..."
The Laudian coup, P.267.
"The image of the anti-Calvinist movement constructed at the first stage of the Trinity manuscript combines avant-garde religio-political thinking with a strong sense of personal allegiances. This description resonates interestingly with recent critical accounts of anti-Calvinism: Andrew Foster, for instance, has attributed the success of the Durham House Group to ‘its close-knit family nature’ and its ability to usher its followers into ‘strategic positions in church and universities,’48....Firstly, it offers fresh perspectives on Andrewes’s contribution to the creation of the tight-knit anti-Calvinist faction that came to power in the 1620s: during his tenure as Bishop of Ely, Andrewes built a strong network of patronage in Cambridge, from which were to emerge not just two future heads of the University (both Cosin and Wren acted as Vice-Chancellor in the 1620s and 1630s, and pushed for the suppression of Calvinist forces in the Colleges), but leading figures in the implementation of anti-Calvinist policies at a national level."
Wren continues the anti-Calvinistic (anti-Calvinistic Anglican and anti-Dissenter) patrimony of two generations of corruption since Laud. P. 271.
"The ties that united the members of Andrewes’s Cambridge circle did not only survive their patron’s death, but also persisted through less auspicious political times. This is nowhere more apparent, perhaps, than in the rhetorical and material self-presentation of John Cosin’s A Scholastical History of the Canon of the Holy Scriptvre. This treatise, published in 1657 at the nadir of the anti-Calvinist crisis (White had died in 1638, Wren was imprisoned in the Tower, Cosin was living in exile), marks another crucial moment of textual self-definition for the group. Here, Cosin exploits the bibliographical and paratextual resources of the printed book to construct a vision of the English church that is based entirely on the personal and ideological heritage of the 1620s and 1630s."
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