No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
It is remarkable that study of William Perkins (1558–1602) has had so little impact on conventional interpretations of English history. Of the work of this great pastoral theologian, William Haller observed that “no books… were more often to be found upon the shelves of succeeding generations of preachers, and the name of no preacher recurs more often in later Puritan literature.” In an article which commented upon Perkins's undeserved obscurity, Louis Wright suggested that in Perkins's thought Max Weber would have found “pertinent illustrations” for the famous argument about Protestantism and capitalism. Historical scholarship generally appears to have followed Wright's suggestion, mining Perkins's works for “pertinent illustrations” of established outlooks. Perkins has been pressed into service in economic and political versions of Haller's neo-Foxian epic which describes religious forces gathering relentlessly toward a mid-seventeenth-century climax. Other historians, encountering Perkins's insistent defense of the established church, have portrayed him as an Elizabethan moderate of varying degrees of sincerity and importance. Ultimately, these unproductive readings rest on an assumed typology of Anglicanism and Puritanism which casts Puritan theology as sectarian and disruptive while reserving the culturally integrative role of a churchly religion for Anglicanism. However faithfully this typology represents the outcome of seventeenth-century English history, it may have impeded fruitful analysis of Perkins's thought.
1. Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1957), p. 65.Google Scholar
2. Wright, Louis B., “William Perkins: Elizabethan Apostle of ‘Practical Divinity’,” Huntington Library Quarterly 3 (06 1940): 182.Google Scholar
3. The panoramic interpretations include New, John F. H., Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition, 1558–1640 (Stanford, 1964);Google ScholarHill, Christopher, “William Perkins and the Poor,” Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1962);Google ScholarLittle, David, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1969);Google Scholar and Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York, 1976).Google Scholar The contrasting view is represented By Sisson, Rosemary, “William Perkins, Apologist for the Elizabethan Church of England,” The Modern Language Review 47, no. 9 (10 1952): 495–502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. Ian, Breward, ed., “Introduction,” The Work of William Perkins (Appleford, Eng., 1970), p. 14.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., pp. 15, 23–25. See also Breward, Ian, “The Life and Theology of William Perkins,1558–1602” (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, 1963).Google Scholar
6. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the Carnegie Foundation. I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for a grant which supported part of the research for this paper.
7. Perhaps the best approach to the general method of structural analysis developed in the works of Claude Levi-Strauss is Sperber, Dan, Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Morton, Alice L. (Cambridge, 1975),Google Scholar chap. 3.
8. Perkins, William, A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1598).Google Scholar All references are to this widely available edition. Detailed comparison with the 1597 edition owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library discloses significant additions on pages 1, 134, 135, 144, 343, 344, and 360 as well as on the first page of “The Epistle.” A Reformed Catholike appeared in five editions as well as in the many collections of Perkins's works. The Jacobean controversy about A Reformed Catholike presents, in conventional terms of analysis, the anomaly of an elaborate establishment defense of the premier Puritan theologian. Perkins's book was attacked by the Roman Catholic William Bishop (1554–1624) and defended by Robert Abbot (1560–1617), brother of the Archbishop, who himself became Bishop of Salisbury. I have carried out a full analysis of this controversy.
9. Tyacke, Nicholas, “Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad, Russell (New York, 1973), pp. 119–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. [v].Google Scholar
11. William Bishop, D. B. P., The Reformation of a Catholic Deformed … The Former Part (n.p., 1604), p. 35.Google Scholar
12. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. 39.Google Scholar
13. Ibid., p. 40.
14. Ibid., pp. 51, 53.
15. Ibid., title page; compare p. [ii] and p. 330.
16. Ibid., p. [ii].
17. Ibid., pp. 184, 207–208,66, 119.
18. Ibid., p. [ii].
19. Ibid., pp. 64–65.
20. Ibid., p. 65.
21. Ibid., p. 72.
22. Ibid., p. 72.
23. The background of Perkins's comparison is inevitably vague, but one specific candidate would be contemporary efforts to break entails in order to secure free alienation of land. Simpson, A. W. B., Introduction to the History of English Land Law (Oxford, 1961), pp. 118–223.Google Scholar
24. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, pp. 72–73.Google Scholar
25. Ibid., p.68.
26. Ibid., pp. 68–69.
27. Ibid., pp. 69–70. The imputation of human sin to Christ was not an incidental function of Perkins's system of thought. Perkins, William, An Exposition of the Symbol, in The Works…, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1609), 1: 192–209,Google Scholar developed it extensively in the context of Christ's arraignment before Pilate.
28. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. 70.Google Scholar
29. Ibid.
30. According to Aristotle, species characteristics are realized in individuals by the variably successful male transmission of that form. Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, 640a. Compare Ross, W. D., Aristotle (Cleveland, 1959), pp. 116–127;Google Scholar and Gasking, Elizabeth, Investigations into Generation, 1651–1828 (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 19–20, 29.Google Scholar For Perkins's Aristotelianism, see Breward, , “Introduction,” pp. 3–4.Google Scholar
31. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. 119.Google Scholar
32. Ibid., pp. 34–35, 31- 32. Indeed, death itself is explicitly taken to indicate the continuing presence of original sin.
33. Ibid., p. 122.
34. Ibid., pp. 207–208.
35. Ibid., p. 211.
36. Ibid., pp. 185–187.
37. Ibid., p. 304.
38. Ibid., pp. 187–188. Compare Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbol, 1: 305.
39. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. 185.Google Scholar For these notions of signs and motivation, see Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, trans. Lavers, Annette and Smith, Colin (Boston, 1970), pp. 38–42, 50–52.Google Scholar
40. Perkins used the expression “Christ's body' gingerly so as to actually refer to the derivation of Christ's righteousness through his humanity. “And this is the cause, why not only in the preaching of the word, but also in the institution of the Lord's Supper, express mention is made, not only of Christ's merit, but also of his very body and blood, whereby the whole humanity is signified … (Perkins, , An Exposition of the Symbol, 1: 305)Google Scholar.
41. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, pp. 177–179.Google Scholar
42. Ibid., p. 174.
43. Ibid., p. 173.
45. Ibid., p. 179.
46. Ibid., p. 182.
47. Ibid., pp. 175–176, 183–184.
48. Ibid., p. 184.
49. Ibid., p. [ii].
50. Ibid., p.360. Compare the Folger copy, p. 356.
51. Ibid., p.286.
52. Ibid., p. 286.
53. Ibid., p. 287.
54. Ibid., pp. 3–7, 333.
55. Ibid., p. 314.
56. Ibid., pp. 133, 150.
57. Ibid., pp. 134–135. This point was emphasized by a change from the original phrase, “Not of men but from God Himself” (Folger Library copy, p. 134).
58. Ibid., pp. 140, 144–145, 149–150.
59. Ibid., p.40.
60. Ibid., p. 300.
61. Einstein, Elizabeth L., “Some Conjectures About the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of Modern History 40 (1968): 30–31.Google Scholar
62. Ibid., p. 31.
63. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar
64. Ibid., pp. 148–149.
65. Erikson, Erik, Childhood and Society (New York, 1963), pp. 72–80.Google Scholar
66. Gardner, Howard, “From Mode to Symbol: Thoughts on the Genesis of the Arts,” British Journal of Aesthetics 10 (1970): 369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
67. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, pp. 38, 44–45Google Scholar
68. For example, Perkins, , An Exposition of the Symbol, 1: 302.Google Scholar
69. Ibid., p. 283.
70. Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, p. 315.Google Scholar
71. Ibid., p. 85.
72. Ibid., pp. 271- 272.