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William Perkins, “Atheisme,” and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Leif Dixon
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Type
Research Article
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 790 - 812
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2011

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References

1 One example, among many, is the contemporary anxiety over how language could be used to obscure, rather than reveal, one’s true intentions. See Skinner, Quentin, “Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence,” in Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), 264–85Google Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Wootton, David, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berman, David, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Strathmann, E. A., Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (London, 1951)Google Scholar; Kocher, P. H., Christopher Marlowe (London, 1946)Google Scholar; Allen, Don Cameron, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1964)Google Scholar.

3 Wootton, David, “New Histories of Atheism,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Wootton, David and Hunter, Michael (Oxford, 1992), 26Google Scholar.

4 Hunter, Michael, “The Problem of Atheism in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985): 135–57Google Scholar.

5 John Dove, A Confutation of Atheisme (1605), 2. (When no place of publication is given, London is to be understood.)

6 Martin Fotherby, Atheomastix (1622), 41.

7 Ibid., 46.

8 Ibid., dedicatory epistle, A2r–A3v.

9 More, George, A Demonstration of God in His Workes (1598), 33–34.Google Scholar

10 Fotherby, Atheomastix, B3r, 39.

11 Berman, David, “Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland,” in Wootton and Hunter, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, 263Google Scholar.

12 This conservative estimate is drawn from Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 2006), 23, 29Google Scholar.

13 See, famously, Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

14 The word first appeared in English in 1561.

15 See, e.g., Broedel, Hans Peter, The “Malleus Maleficarum” and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester, 2003)Google Scholar.

16 Wootton, “New Histories of Atheism,” 25.

17 Buckley, Michael, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT, 1987), 10Google Scholar.

18 Smith, Henry, Gods Arrow Against Atheists (1604), 1Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., 2–3.

20 Ibid., 6.

21 Ibid., 32.

22 See, e.g., Stephens, Walter, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002), 25Google Scholar.

23 Dove, A Confutation of Atheisme, dedicatory epistle.

24 Ibid., 77.

25 Ibid., 79.

26 Ibid., 90.

27 Dove seems to fit neatly into Alan Kors’s account of how mainstream divines used the construction of the atheist as a “heuristic device” or “hypothetical mind” against which they could range their theistic arguments. “Real” atheism, argues Kors, may have emerged from the widespread publicity given to its fictive twin. See Kors, Alan, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol. 1, The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 109ffGoogle Scholar.

28 Lake, Peter, “A Charitable Christian Hatred: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline (Basingstoke, 1996), 183Google Scholar.

29 Dove, A Confutation of Atheisme, 3.

30 Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 6.

31 Bacon represents a useful contrast to Perkins. “Of Atheism” was written in the 1590s, and so he was commenting on the same sorts of phenomena as Perkins. Bacon, though, was “overwhelmingly secular in his interests” and certainly belonged to a very different intellectual and political tradition to that of Perkins. Zagorin, Perez, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 49–51Google Scholar.

32 Perkins, William, How to Live, and That Well, in The Workes of … William Perkins (1608), 1:474Google Scholar. (All subsequent references to Perkins are drawn from this volume; references to different editions are indicated in the usual fashion.)

33 Ibid., 481.

34 Ibid., 477.

35 Ibid., 474.

36 Perkins, , Exposition of the Symbole or the Creede of the Apostles, in The Workes of … William Perkins (1612), 129Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 162.

38 Perkins, , Golden Chaine, in The Workes of … William Perkins (1608), 20Google Scholar.

39 Ibid.

40 Perkins, How to Live, 479.

41 Ibid., 474.

42 Perkins, , Exposition of the Creede, in The Workes of … William Perkins (1612), 125Google Scholar.

43 Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, John T. (1961), I.3.iiiGoogle Scholar.

44 Bacon, Francis, “Of Atheism,” in Complete Essays (New York, 2008), 49Google Scholar.

45 Ibid.

46 Fotherby, Atheomastix, dedicatory epistle, A2r–A3r.

47 Ibid., 9.

48 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 128.

49 Ibid.

50 Perkins, How to Live, 481.

51 Ibid., 480–81.

52 Morrill, John, “Afterword: The Word Became Flawed,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Hessayon, Ariel and Keene, Nicholas (Aldershot, 2006), 248Google Scholar.

53 The debate over the Johannine Comma related to ostensibly obscure points of Greek grammar that, nevertheless, affected the interpretation of key biblical passages relating to the Trinity and the question of whether the Trinity is, strictly speaking, described in Scripture. The debate over who wrote the Pentateuch concerns the question of whether Moses was the sole author (as dictated by tradition) or whether the scribe Ezra had written some of the text. In both cases, humanist scholarship was pointedly questioning long-held assumptions about the Bible. See, e.g., Iliffe, Rob, “Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma,” in Hessayon and Keene, Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, 137–57Google Scholar; Malcolm, Norman, “Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 383–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Perkins, How to Live, 479.

55 Popkin, Richard H., The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Los Angeles, 1979), xixGoogle Scholar.

56 Perkins, How to Live, 481.

57 Perkins, Golden Chaine, 11.

58 Perkins, How to Live, 480.

59 Perkins, Golden Chaine, 40.

60 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 129.

61 Perkins, , A Reformed Catholike, in The Workes of … William Perkins (1612), 583Google Scholar.

62 Popkin, History of Scepticism, 16.

63 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 140–41.

64 Calvin, Institutes, I.4.ii.

65 Bacon, “Of Atheism,” 50.

66 Dove, Confutation of Atheisme, 1.

67 Ibid., 51.

68 Fotherby, Atheomastix, 67.

69 Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, 61.

70 Bacon, “Of Atheism,” 50.

71 Bacon, Francis, “Of Unity in Religion,” in Complete Essays (New York, 2008), 10Google Scholar.

72 See Haigh, Christopher, “Anticlericalism in the English Reformation,” in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, Christopher (Cambridge, 1987), 55–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Bacon, “Of Atheism,” 50.

74 Bacon, “Of Unity in Religion,” 9. This point is also discussed by McGinnis, Timothy Scott, in George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort: Puritan Priorities in Elizabethan Religious Life (Kirksville, MO, 2004), 105Google Scholar.

75 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 129.

76 Ibid., 134.

77 Ibid., 125.

78 Ibid., 126.

79 Perkins, Golden Chaine, 164.

80 Perkins, How to Live, 479.

81 Ibid.

82 Perkins, Golden Chaine, 123.

83 Ibid.

84 Patterson, W. B., “William Perkins as Apologist for the Church of England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57, no. 2 (2006): 252–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 163.

86 de Unamuno, Miguel, Poesía Completa, vol. 1 (Madrid, 1987), “Salmo IIGoogle Scholar.”

87 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 128.

88 Perkins, How to Live, 480.

89 Perkins, Exposition of the Creede, 163.

90 Popkin, History of Scepticism, 16.