Nation of Prophets: Aesthetics and Politics in Revolutionary England

In the years 1640 to 1660, England was awash in prophecy. The breakdown of official censorship, coupled with political unrest and a rising number of sectarian religious groups, led multitudes of English people – including children, the unlearned, and over 400 women – to feel the spirit of God upon them, and to expound divine will in pulpit or pamphlet. This dissertation explores the major epistemological problem that accompanies England’s dramatic prophetic proliferation. By inviting conflicting, irreconcilable truth claims into the public sphere, prophecy threatens to divide (and perhaps even dissolve) the commonwealth. Prophecy crystallizes the central question facing revolutionary England (not to mention a central question of twenty-first century political life): in a “Nation of Prophets,” with each person or sect claiming the authority to speak the truth, how do we reach consensus? Mired in intractable differences of belief, how can the nation function at all? Existing scholarship largely describes revolutionary prophets modeling their authority on the canonical Old Testament prophets; in this tradition, the prophet claims authoritative, unmediated knowledge of divine will, asserting their own message over and against an opposing falsehood. This narrative dovetails with accounts of the civil war that emphasize sectarian conflict and the burgeoning of individual, antinomian authority. In contrast, Nation of Prophets traces a strain of New Testament prophecy through revolutionary prophets and prophetic poets, as well as through civil war politics more broadly. In the New Testament, responding specifically to issues of sectarianism, Paul reframes prophecy as inherently partial, insistently communal, and meaningless without a spirit of charity. I show how the discourse of New Testament prophecy inflects key revolutionary political debates about toleration and liberty of conscience, and develop a new understanding of prophecy’s role in the public sphere. The central prophets and prophetic poets addressed here – Elizabeth Poole, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson – refuse to claim comprehensive, authoritative knowledge of divine will; instead, they suggest that God can be felt in and through collective experience, and aim to help readers feel themselves to be incorporate members of a broader whole. The prophet transforms history not by revealing hitherto obscured divine knowledge, but by generating a sense of shared being that in turn motivates political action. Through their discussion of prophecy, my first three chapters recover the role of collective affect in the literature and politics of revolutionary England. My final chapter uncovers a legacy of collectivist, civil war prophecy in the Romantic period. While scholars have noted the “line of vision” from Milton to the Romantics, they often stereotype the Miltonic poet-prophet as an authoritative individual (whether drawing the Romantics into this tradition or distinguishing them from it). I show how William Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, drawing on the history of the civil wars, frame the function of prophetic authorship in parallel to the revolutionary prophets of the previous three chapters: augmenting the “social sympathies,” the prophetic author transforms politics by transforming social relations. Finally, this chapter questions the viability of such a prophetic mode in the context of secular modernity.

Advisor: Picciotto, Joanna