"The reformation brought a further hardening of
attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the
biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan
fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in
Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the
Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war,
executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and
brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already
were..."
From The Guardian's book pages by Faramerz Dabhoiwela.
Not sure I agree with this - the English Civil War ushered in much freedom.
Can it really be a coincidence that gay life began to flourish a mere two generations later?
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John Milton was on the puritan side but for personal reasons published several tracts in favour of divorce, so Puritanism may have been a more complicated movement than the excerpt claims.
ReplyDeleteAnyway they executed a king and that's good enough.
I don't know, from my own studies of the Early Modern period, such insurrection led to the hardening of attitudes towards spiritual and temporal non conformity at the time of the restoration. Things returned very much towards what they had been in the reign of James I/VI.
ReplyDeleteSo for Women, minorities and non line towing churchmen nothing changed until later in the 17th century and even then the were pretty small.
However you could argue that during the commonwealth there was a greater toleration of varying degrees of protestantism - but even this was easily strained.
But there was a great outburst of libertinism during the English Civil War.
ReplyDeleteMuch of it sexual...
I would agree with that to a certain extent. Much of the libertinism would have come from the lack of order and social control due to the 'civil war', so I would argue it was this alongside egalitarian ideals.
ReplyDeleteHowever sexual liberation would still have been on the extremes of contemporary society (such as the ranters) and well hidden within the rest of society.
One of the contemporary slurs of popular print culture against women having any open spiritual or temporal role beyond the home was the image of women parliaments and women in men’s clothing.
The image of gender fluidity in dress was also used by the parliamentarian pamphleteers to attack the more decadent members of the royalist party.
Sorry to go Fagburn, but I had scary a scary Professor for the civil war period and I’m getting academic flashbacks…I love you really.
S'okay.
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