Peter Lake. The Boxmaker's Revenge: "Orthodoxy," "Heterodoxy" and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. x + 422 pp. $65.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-7190-5967-4; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8047-4128-6.

Reviewed by Sears McGee (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2002)

To the distinguished micro-historical company of such colorful individuals as Carlo Ginzburg's miller, Menocchio, and Paul Seaver's turner, Nehemiah Wallington, we must now welcome Peter Lake's boxmaker, John Etherington. >From what must have seemed to be unpromising sources in the early going, Lake has ingeniously fashioned an engaging and important story. He admits that "in intention this was a 'short silly book,' a micro-history that got big on me. It is now too long to be short and too theological to be entertainingly silly" (p. ix.). The book is indeed both long and theological, but the disadvantages caused by the relative thinness of the sources are more than offset by the fact that they stretch out over so much time and reveal so intimately the minds and experiences not only of the boxmaker but his irascible clerical adversary, Stephen Denison. Lake closely reads the writings and actions of these two men and their allies and supporters, as well as related polemical exchanges involving disagreements within the "puritan mainstream" itself. Against scholars who have argued that catechisms and other such "supposedly purer un- or non-polemical sources" afford us a "more objective account of contemporary opinion," he makes a powerful case for his view that the use of polemical sources is essential and give us a "glimpse into a world that we do not usually get to see at all" (pp. 5, 8).

The outcome is a series of vivid insights into the working of what Lake calls "the London puritan underground" before 1640 and an ambitious rethinking of the forces and conditions that led to "the ideological cacophony of the 1640s" (p. 410). Nor should the word "theological" put off potential readers. Etherington, Denison and many others come alive as real people scratching at each other and clawing for any advantage presented by the larger national struggle between "Puritans" and "Laudians" and doing so in the real streets and houses of London as well as in pulpits and print. For example, we eavesdrop in the home of a grocer ("Cullombeame's house in Thames Street") where Etherington waited to debate familism with an adversary who failed to arrive (p. 364). And we are in the church court when Denison was "formally accused of having 'attempted the chastity' of four married women of the parish" (p. 314). Both men are shown to be struggling to position themselves to win battles for charismatic status and orthodox credibility in a genuine public sphere, albeit one largely limited to the London godly. Lake displays a firm grasp of the complexities and subtleties of the urban milieu in which these polemical battles were fought and refought not only among divines but among lay men and women.

Lake begins his tale by describing a bizarre event at St. Paul's Cross on February 11, 1627. Forced to attend and stand with a paper affixed to his chest, Etherington had to listen to Denison preach a sermon in which he was denounced as a familist, anabaptist, Arminian, and sect-master. Soon published as The White Wolf with a dedication to Charles I, the sermon established Denison as a hard-charging heresy-hunter defending a thoroughgoing predestinarian soteriology while at the same time insisting on the heinous error of separatism. That Etherington had indeed had a fling with familist ideas for some years around 1600 is evident from his first published tract, A description of the true church of Christ (1610), although he later denounced key aspects of familism, confuted separatist anabaptists, and claimed to embrace the Church of England. Ironically, that "embrace" was facilitated by the Nicodemist strain of thinking about outward conformity that he retained from his shadowy mentor "T.L.," a man deeply indebted to Henry (Hendrik) Niclaes. Both Denison and Etherington claimed to be centrists defending orthodoxy against heterodoxy, a game that Lake described among different players in his first book (Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan church, 1982). In the late 1620s, Etherington was the loser and spent many years in prison. An attempt to free himself by appealing to bishops Neile and Buckeridge failed when Denison adroitly forced him to admit his rejection of Laudian sacramental notions. But by the early 1630s Denison himself was in trouble because of his vocal opposition to a plan for the reconstruction and redecoration of his church, St. Katherine Cree. This effort was led by some of his wealthiest parishioners and culminated in "the epitome of a new model Laudian church" (p. 308). Laud himself chose to reconsecrate it in a very grand manner in January 1631. Although Denison had allies, especially among the middling sort in his parish, his enemies there managed to engineer his removal after a protracted conflict in 1635-36. He retained a monthly Saturday pre-communion lecture that had been endowed for him by a wealthy woman in 1621, but it was removed to a nearby parish. Although he published nothing after 1641, surviving sermon notes from the late 1630s show him refighting old battles against various enemies, especially men like Etherington (at least according to his highly selective but not wholly mistaken understanding of the boxmaker's views).

Denison died in 1649, and if he was relatively quiet after losing his post, Etherington capitalized upon the new press freedom to defend himself against the charges his old nemesis had earlier made--hence, the "boxmaker's revenge." By the time he published A Voyce out of the wildernes (1651), his "strange ideological synthesis" contained so many different elements that it "represents almost an archaeological section cut through the discursive deposits left in the capital by fifty-odd years of intra-protestant debate and puritan spiritual experience and sectarian experiment" (p. 385). Lake concludes by arguing against the view that there was "an underground sectarian tradition, largely separate from and antipathetic to mainstream puritanism" (p. 397) in which the former is "radical" and the latter "moderate." Rather, he contends that the "relatively hard-edged, Denison-centered ideological definition of puritanism" should give way to a "more fuzzy-edged 'phenomenological' approach." Thus someone like Etherington was not outside "the social entity of the godly or puritan community" but within it and contributing to its continual and dynamic reshaping. Puritan divinity purposely produced anxious Wallingtons who avidly sought assurance. But it also engendered critical Etheringtons who heeded the clerics' instructions to con the Scriptures but reached surprising conclusions. This is to elevate what Lake calls "the social fact of godly insiderhood" above doctrinal considerations; it is to stress not "numbered points of right opinion" but "diction, affect and personal and ideological association or affinity" (pp. 408-9).

Fuzzy, yes. Even slippery. And Lake might concede that by inserting "ideological association" into his list, he may have reinserted the doctrinal concerns that he wants to downplay. Nevertheless, his stimulating book convincingly embeds theological passions in the social and cultural world of the City of London. It is essential reading for anyone interested in interested British religious, political, social and cultural history from the 1590s through the 1650s. John Etherington, a "sort of back-street Socrates, feeding dialogically off the doubts and obsessions of the godly laity and the excesses and self-contradictions of the godly clergy" (p. 409), now joins our growing group of intriguing figures through whom we can see the world from the bottom up instead of the top down.

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Citation: Sears McGee. Review of Lake, Peter, The Boxmaker's Revenge: "Orthodoxy," "Heterodoxy" and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. August, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6654

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