No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Histories of Heterodoxy: Shifting Approaches to a Millenarian Tradition in Modern Church History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
In 1956, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge published a work chronicling a subject billed as ‘an unrecorded chapter of Church history’. The author was an elderly Anglican clergyman, George Balleine. The book was Past Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors.
Before Balleine, the early nineteenth-century figure of Joanna Southcott, and her eventually global religious movement, had garnered scant mainstream attention. The most extensive work was Ronald Matthews’s rudimentary analysis of Southcott and five other ‘English Messiahs’ in a 1936 contribution to the psychology of religion. Southcott had not, in fact, claimed to be a messiah herself; rather, she was the prophet of a coming messiah named ‘Shiloh’. Southcott’s followers (variously labelled ‘Southcottians’, ‘Christian Israelites’ ‘Jezreelites’, among other names) believed that she and certain later figures were inspired by God to signal the imminence of the Christian millennium. Claimants to be the actual Shiloh messiah occasionally featured within this particular tradition of biblical interpretation, inspiration and theodicy. The splinter-prone movement spread through Britain, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and retained a few thousand members in the twentieth century.
- Type
- Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
References
1 Balleine, George, Past Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and Her Successors (London, 1956), ix.Google Scholar
2 Between 1900 and 1950, many publications on Joanna Southcott were produced by followers, most notably Alice Seymour, The Express, 2 vols (London, 1909); eadem, The Voice in the Wilderness: The Gospel of the Holy Spirit as given to Joanna Southcott by the Spirit of Truth (Ashford, 1933).
3 Matthews, Ronald, English Messiahs: Studies of Six English Religious Pretenders, 1656–1927 (London, 1936).Google Scholar
4 On ‘Shiloh’ and interpretations of Gen. 49: 10, see Allan, Gordon, ‘Southcottian Sects from 1790 to the Present Day’, in Newport, Kenneth and Gribben, Crawford, eds, Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context (Waco, TX, 2006), 213–36, at 219.Google Scholar
5 Balleine’s unacknowledged sources were most likely rare printed collections available to him locally as vicar of Bermondsey in London (a historic Southcottian haunt) during the 1930s. He may also have consulted material already deposited in the British Museum (later forming part of the British Library collection). I am indebted to Andrew Atherstone for insights into Balleine’s clerical career and Southcottian interests.
6 Balleine, , Past Finding Out, xi.Google Scholar
7 Ibid, ix, 2–4, 7, 10, 19–22, 24–5.
8 Ibid. x.
9 Shaw, Jane, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (London, 2011).Google Scholar
10 This team all belonged to an Oxford interdisciplinary research project, the Prophecy Project, convened by Dr Jane Shaw and Professor Christopher Rowland from 2003 to 2010.
11 Shaw, , Octavia, 80–3.Google Scholar
12 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1968), 13, 420–8 Google Scholar; Saville, John, ‘J. E. Smith and the Owenite Movement, 1833–1834’, in Pollard, Sidney and Salt, John, eds, Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (London, 1971), 115–44.Google Scholar
13 Harrison, J. F. C., The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Hopkins, J. K., A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, TX, 1982).Google Scholar Essays challenging distinctions between elite and popular religion notably feature in Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy, eds, Elite and Popular Religion, SCH 42 (Woodbridge, 2006).Google Scholar
14 See esp. Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA, 1995)Google Scholar; Mee, Jon, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; Juster, Susan, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, PA, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bar-Yosef, Eitan, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005).Google Scholar
15 Ward, W. R., ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious Protest’, in Baker, Derek, ed., Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, SCH 9 (Cambridge, 1972), 303–10 Google Scholar; Lineham, P.J., ‘Restoring Man’s Creative Power: The Theosophy of the Bible Christians of Salford’, in Sheils, W.J., ed., The Church and Healing, SCH 19 (Oxford, 1982), 207–23.Google Scholar
16 Flegg, Columba Graham, ‘Gathered under Apostles’: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilley, Sheridan, ‘Edward Irving: Prophet of the Millennium’, in Garnett, Jane and Matthew, Colin, eds, Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), 95–110 Google Scholar; Grass, Tim, The Lord’s Watchman: Edward Irving, SEHT (Milton Keynes, 2011)Google Scholar.
17 Lockley, Philip, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England (Oxford, 2013).Google Scholar
18 My reflections on this subject were further influenced by close involvement with Shaw’s study as a research assistant.
19 Mack, Phyllis, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge, 2008).Google Scholar
20 The principal deposits for American varieties of Southcottianism are the University of Michigan and Hamilton College, New York State. The tendency for Southcottian material to migrate across the Atlantic has been recendy countered by a substantial deposit of ‘Jezreelite’ material (1870–1900) in the Medway Archives, Rochester. My Oxford colleague, Ruth Windscheffel, has made extensive use of this new collection in her forthcoming study of James and Esther Jezreel.
21 Wright, Eugene, A Catalogue of the Joanna Southcott Collection at the University of Texas (Austin, TX, 1968).Google Scholar
22 Before Jane Shaw’s discovery of the Panacea Society collections in 2001, and the Oxford Prophecy Project that followed, the only archive-based studies since Balleine to feature any Southcottian papers were the social histories of Harrison and Hopkins. Subsequent gender, literary and cultural studies made minimal reference to primary evidence.Google Scholar
23 Hempton, David, ‘Evangelicalism and Eschatology’, JEH 31 (1980), 179–94, at 182Google Scholar; idem, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1730–1850 (London, 1984), 95.Google Scholar
24 Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750–1900 (London, 1996), 94.Google Scholar
25 The reference for this quotation from Bunting’s journal is given as Bunting, T. P., The Life of Jabez Bunting, D.D. with Notices of Contemporary Persons and Events (London, 1887), 182.Google Scholar
26 Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Methodist Church Archives, Papers of Jabez Bunting.
27 London, BL, Add. MS 47794, fol. 14.
28 For such lists, see Bedford, Panacea Society, PN 240 fol. 20; PN 243, fol. 81; Austin, TX, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Research Center, Joanna Southcott Collection, 370–2.
29 Harry Ransom Research Center, Joanna Southcott Collection, 372.
30 York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, Records of the Diocesan Administration of the Archbishop of York, Dissenters Faculty Book 3 (1793–1816), fols 342, 346, 392, 396, 404, 409, 414, 422.
31 Ibid., fols 603, 608–10, 613, 622, 636–7, 642–3.
32 John Wroe, The Life and Journal of John Wroe, with Divine Communications …, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Ashton-under-Lyne, 1900), 1: 96–121, 319; Anon., Extracts of Letters and Other Writings of the Israelite Preachers 1823 (Wakefield, 1840), 8–9; Anon., Extracts of Letters and Other Writings of the Israelite Preachers 1827 (Wakefield, 1840), 8.Google Scholar
33 Anon., Extracts of Letters and Other Writings of the Israelite Preachers 182c (Wakefield, 1840), 9.
34 Ibid. 10.
35 Ibid.
36 Mann, Horace, Religious Worship in England and Wales: Abridged from the Official Report made by Horace Mann (London, 1854), 53–4 Google Scholar; Snell, K. D. M. and Ell, Paul S., Rival Jenisalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), 404, 423–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is not to claim that all such census sects would be considered as ‘heterodox’ as Southcottianism by church historians; my point is to hint at a compellingly unchartered hinterland awaiting adequate exploration.