Reading the English Revolution: The Literature and Politics of Typological Interpretation

Abstract

My dissertation examines a group of seventeenth-century English religious dissenters whose shared millenarian beliefs, despite other theological and political differences, united them in an imagined community of readers. Those within this circle, including Eleanor Davies, John and Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, exerted a profound influence on the political debates of the 1640s to 1680s on both sides of the royalist-dissenter divide. The revival of ancient chiliastic doctrines, which held that certain events foretold in the Bible had not yet come to pass and that Christ soon would return to earth to rule over his saints, opened Holy Writ to history on an unprecedented scale. Millenarians treated the actors and events of the English Civil War as texts to be read and interpreted typologically, their mysteries unlocked through the divine mechanism of a Word unmediated except by human reason and the individual reader's spiritual communion with Christ. Positioned within this schema, and against the traditional agents of religious, state, and other institutional authority, readers arrogated to themselves positions of primacy. Simultaneously bound by the Bible's teleology and liberated by the metaphoric multivalency of its individual semantic units, literate prophets ceaselessly negotiated and renegotiated their personal and national identities using the tools of literary analysis and biblical exegesis. Precisely because their prophecies were rooted in acts of interpretation, they were able to revise their readings and reading protocols to accommodate shifting historical circumstances. As a result, the hermeneutic was able to exert a persistent influence upon narratives and literary representations of English history. Not only did millenarianism continue to win converts among radicals even after 1660, but its epistemological and ontological bases also framed in important, if sometimes refracted, ways royalist enactments of identity, agency, and history as late as the Exclusion Crisis, as I demonstrate in a study of Aphra Behn's Rover plays. Tracing the development of the hermeneutic from 1625-1681 allows me to illustrate the centrality of reading practices generally to historical change and, conversely, the effects of historical change on reading practices.