“Of those men I may conclude generally,” Burton wrote in 1621, a year after the sailing of the Mayflower, “that howsoever they may seem to be discreet, and men of understanding in other matters…they are like comets, round in all places but where they blaze.”Īs Burton observed in his vast and eclectic The Anatomy of Melancholy, a chapter of which was devoted to spiritual despair, “We may say of these peculiar sects, their religion takes away not spirits only, but wit and judgment. They were known also as Separatists, for their sporadic opposition to the Anglican church, became known as Puritans, for their theological severity, and later still as Pilgrims, in recognition of the Atlantic journey that their theology seemed to require of them, and that brought to the fertile soil of mercantilist America the ascetic seedlings of our vast middle-classness. They referred to themselves as “the Godly,” but were called by others less charitable “the precise ” another epithet was “Brownist,” after Robert “Troublechurch” Browne, an early charismatic leader. IN OUR DAYS we have a new scene of superstitious impostors and heretics,” declared the scholastic Robert Burton, about the fierce English Calvinists skeptical of the Anglican compromise and known by a series of sobriquets in the unruly Englands of Elizabeth and James.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |