Making three stereotypes–those of the Puritan, the Papist, and the Projector–the main focus, this volume tries to make sense of early modern English culture in a way that attends to social psychology and to the historically contingent and complex uses of stereotypes. The editor, Yogi Yamamoto, who teaches business history at the University of Tokyo, has closely collaborated with the historian Peter Lake, whose interdisciplinary studies of the relationship of early modern English religious history and literary texts are exemplary. Their Introduction, their chapter on ‘Alchemists, puritans and projectors in the plays of Jonson’, and their co-authored ‘Coda’ to the book, written with Sandra Jovchelovtich, provide a kind of through-line in the argument, as do the many helpful internal cross-references to other essays by other contributors. Although the attention to stereotypes of the puritan, the papist, and projector shifts somewhat in the essays in the last third of this collection, the focus on the ways stereotypes function in early modern culture never flags.
In these studies, stereotypes are not simply misperceptions, false generalizations, or the foundation blocks of prejudices. They are the flexible cognitive instruments by which people make sense of the world and of their identities. Once established, they are available to be put to new uses in historically changing circumstances, sometimes by those who were their original targets, who could turn them back on their political or religious opponents in act of ‘counter-stereotyping’ (21). Yamamoto and Lake use the expression ‘dialectics of in stereotyping’ (14) to describe how stereotyping, as a phenomenon ‘so foundational to social life’ could escalate so that ‘collective engagements with stereotypes often ended up perpetuating or even accelerating the very processes of stereotyping’ (14).
In ‘Religious and National Stereotyping and Prejudice in Seventeenth-Century England’ (chapter 1), Tim Harris examines ‘Scotophobia’ (36), in particular the opposition to Scottish Presbyterianism, in the context of a set of general reflections on the nature of stereotyping and prejudice. He focuses on polemical texts that utilize Scotophobia, anti-puritanism, and anti-popery ‘for partisan ends’ (38) in changing political contexts. He looks, for example, at the creation of ‘a false composite’ stereotype of the Scotsman whose features ‘were never found together in any one Scottish person’ (46): ‘we see images of the Scots as barbaric and uncivilized, Highlanders, foreign nationals, enemy others and Presbyterians all blurred into one’ (47). The uses of the anti-Scottish stereotype, Harris notes, had to change in the context of the English Civil Wars, in which, first, the Scottish Covenanters supported the Parliament against the King, but, then were allies of King Charles in the second Civil War in 1648. In the last part of his essay, Harris looks at anti-popery as a flexible instrument able to be used for contradictory political lends: by radical reformers to attack on the more conservative English Church and by more moderate Protestants who saw Catholicism as supportive of resistance to royal authority. In the Restoration period it became a blunt instrument for both Whigs and Tories in their political competition with one another.
Peter Lake’s ‘On Thinking (Historically) With Stereotypes, on the Puritan Origins of Anti-Puritanism’ (chapter 2) upends the usual account of the formation of the puritan stereotype as the creation of religious and cultural conservatives, whose attitudes were expressed in contemporary polemics, literature and drama, by pointing to puritans’ own behaviour and self-descriptions as its foundation. He directs our attention to the Presbyterian George Gifford’s A brief discourse of certaine points of religion (1581), ‘a dialogue between a godly minister, called Zelotes, and one of his parishioners, called Atheos … [which] contains at its heart a fully realised version of the stereotype of the puritan as proud, preening, Pharisaical hypocrite …. the puritan as hypocrite and busybody as “busy controller”’ (66). Years before the Marprelate tracts, Lake points out, the stereotype of the puritan was in place in such a work and in the social performances of puritan preachers. Lake takes the opportunity in this essay to critique not only what he calls Eamon Duffy’s ‘Panglossian’ (71) account of pre-Reformation English Catholicism, but also Alec Ryrie’s fusion of puritanism and Protestantism in the kind of account of Protestant triumphalism to which revisionist historians objected.
Koji Yamamoto’s ‘History Plays, Catholic Polemics and the Staging of Political Economy in Elizabethan England’ (chapter 3) sees the creation of the stereotype of the ‘projector’ (which may be a term for early Capitalism’s ‘entrepreneur’) as the means of critiquing royal prerogative and the use of patents and monopolies to raise funds for the Crown. Yamamoto suggests that history plays such as Promos and Cassandra, Thomas of Woodstock, and The First and Second parts of Edward IV reproduce Catholic polemical criticisms of the Elizabethan government, not exempting the monarch from the charges of misgovernment and tyranny. The criticisms extended into the Stuart period, using anti-Catholic stereotypes in the attack on projectors. The plays examined ‘exposed the mechanics of royal authority for all to see’ and allowed ‘humbler women and men … [to] competently detect and pass judgment upon the perversion of royal authority’ (107). Such texts were, then, ‘more radical than the Catholic polemics’ (107). What started as an Elizabethan critique of ‘projectors’, then, ‘had explosive political and economic repercussions throughout the seventeenth century.
In ‘Alchemists, Puritans and Projectors in the Plays of Ben Jonson’ (chapter 4), Yamamoto and Lake first define the ‘projector’ as ‘someone with a scheme for intervention in the social or economic life of the nation, purportedly to benefit the commonwealth’. This involved ‘the delegation of the prerogative powers of the Crown’ to those who claimed to be producing ‘public good’ (114). This was a situation ripe for a criticism that took ‘projectors’ (‘a specialised subset of the evil counsellor’ [137]) and, indirectly, the monarch as political targets, especially in the early 1620s when Parliament denounced monopolies and such men as Sir Giles Mompesson and Lionel Cranfield. Such criticism extended into the 1640s, ‘to call legitimacy of the regime, … the personal rule of Charles I, into question’ (142). Examining three of Jonson’s plays (The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an ass), Yamomoto and Lake discuss Jonson’s characters in relation to ‘the longer-term politics of stereotyping’ (114), especially of puritans. They see Jonson, who was dependent on royal patronage, but who also had friends in Parliament who criticized the royal support of various projectors, was attempting to put himself above the fray to present a morally authoritative satiric dramatization of a timely political conflict as he ‘offered come relief from … the profound threat that both puritans and projectors posed to the status quo’ (115). Their discussion ranges widely, considering such topics as customs-farming, the use of the penal laws against Catholics to exchange fines paid to the Crown for ‘de facto toleration’ (117), Thomas Scott’s puritan republicanism as ‘a form of rebellion waiting to happen’ (123), and the dramatist’s rendition of ‘puritan-speak’ (127) as a self-parodying language of religious rectitude. The essay provides a fine-grained account of the delicate historical context of the Jonson plays and of the playwright’s vexed position as both royal client and politically astute critic who had to take seriously the political opposition and maintain the support of a popular audience whose understanding he found wanting.
In ‘Ranter and Quaker Sereotyping in the English Revolution’ (chapter 5), Kate Peters demonstrates the ways in which these religiopolitical radicals were unfairly caricatured in print and visual images by contemporaries in a ‘shared stereotype of dangerous antinomian fanatic with murky social origins’ (150). She discusses the politically adroit uses Ranters and Quakers devised to present, in the turbulent era of the 1650s, their own cases for religious liberty and political reform, to contest their stereotyping, and distinguish themselves from one another. Both groups ‘engaged rhetorically to appropriate and subvert key stereotypes in ways that fortified their own religious identities’ (176).
Adam Morton’s ‘Fighting Popery with Popery: Subverting Stereotypes and Contesting anti-Catholicism in Late Seventeenth-Century England’ (chapter 6) concentrates on the popish plot and succession crisis of 1678-81 to show how ‘both sides of the political divide—understood broadly as Whigs and Tories—asserted opposing visions of what ‘popery’ was in an expanding news media to paint their opponents as ‘popish’ (188). There were two definitions of political legitimacy (one monarchical, the other quasi-republican or parliamentary) that were at the heart of the conflict, which used an older anti-Catholic stereotype for new purposes in changed political circumstances. Like Peters, Morton uses the term ‘counter-stereotyping’ (192) to define the way Tories turned anti-popish rhetoric back on their adversaries. The Tory apologist Roger L’Estrange, to whom Morton devotes much attention, was at the center of this effort. Morton claims, however, that ‘L’Estrange understood his readers to be capable of seeing through stereotypes’ (203), that is, to be aware of the history of their uses and of their distortion of political realities. He notes also that a kind of ‘anti-anti-popery’ flourished as a loyalist ideology in James II’s reign’ (207). In fact, he argues, ‘[a]nti-popery was certainly an intolerance “qualified” by positive appreciation of Catholicism’ (208) since ‘[e]ngagement with Catholic learning and appreciation of Catholic culture was as much a factor of early modern Englishness as was anti-popery’ (208). In the course of their history, stereotypes elicit reader or audience awareness of their previous uses.
In ‘“We do naturally … hate the French”: Francophobia and Francophilia in Samuel Pepys’s Diary’ (chapter 7), David Magliocco examines a different set of stereotypes, the contradictory pro- and anti-French stereotypes as they appear in Pepys’s Diary: one ‘identified with excess’ and one ‘habitually identified with contemporary notions of distinction’ (218). Moving to an international setting, Magliocco notes the changes in English attitudes occasioned by the post-Restoration shift from Hispanophobia and anti-Dutch attitudes to Francophobia, as the France of Louis XIV became England’s most important international adversary. He treats Pepys as a ‘proto-social psychologist’ (221) coping with the conflict between admiration of the French, whose luxury goods and cultural products were highly valued, whose language educated people learned, and whose country Englishmen visited regular on their Grand Tour, and fear of ‘excessive French influence extended to politics and religion’ (230), especially when James II and the French Queen Mother Henrietta Maria were all too visible. Using the rhetoric of ‘moderation’ (whose coercive force Ethan Shagan has discussed), Pepys treated the French as ‘immoderate’ (233) and the image of the ‘Frenchified fop’ entered English drama and fiction as a reflection of contemporary Francophobia and xenophobia as ‘national stereotypes and stereotyping practices took place in a transnational cultural space’ (235).
William Calvert, in ‘“Sin and sea coal”: Smoke as Urban Life in Early Modern London’ (chapter 8), deals with the ambivalent attitude of Englishmen towards urbanization and cities. On the one hand, London, for example, was a filthy, unhealthy place; on the other, it was a commercial and culturally rich centre of the country. Urban pollution and urban manners gave rise to the stereotype of the morally degenerate city dweller in ‘powerful anti-urban rhetoric that argued …that London worsened more problems than it solved’ (247). Tracing the development of the city-dweller stereotype back to the early Stuart times, when, in ‘character’ literature the country fellow was contrasted with the urban sophisticate, Calvert traces the growing association of the rapidly expanding city’s foul air with moral immorality, but, paradoxically urbanites ‘embraced the negative stereotypes’, a phenomenon reflected in the drama and fiction of the time. This essay presents a worthwhile discussion of the ‘anti-urban stereotype’, but it strays from the volume’s announced topic.
This is the problem too with the next essay in the book, Bridget Orr’s ‘Laboratories of Subjectification: Characters and Stereotypes in Late Stuart and Georgian Theatre’ (chapter 9). Beginning with Homi Babha’s analysis of the relationship of stereotyping to colonial discourse, Orr moves in a different direction from the stereotyping process, investigating the ways theatre takes stock characters (stereotypes of a sort) and individuates them, especially, in eighteenth-century performances by actors who shaped the characters they played. New stereotypes were created in a play space that now included female performers such as Nell Gwyn, who, in turn ‘challenge[d] existing gender stereotypes while giving rise to new ones’ (277) that had their counterparts in contemporary domestic fiction. Orr discusses the shaping and reshaping of the Jewish stereotype through the very different performances of the role of Shylock by Charles Macklin and Edmund Kean, the latter of whom ‘reinvented the character, challenged the Venetian stereotype of Jewishness and redefined [The Merchant of Venice] as a romantic comedy’ (280). On the other hand, the Whiggish Macklin also took ethnic stereotypes, such as the stage Irishman, and modified them to serve as a ‘Whig critique of corruption rather than expressing ethic hatred’ (281).
With William J. Bulman’s ‘From Reformation to Enlightenment in Post-Civil War Orientalism’ (chapter 10) the volume’s focused is broadened to show how ‘the politics of stereotyping related to popery and puritanism … were transformed and deployed in Enlightenment depictions of societies outside western Europe, and in particular the Ottoman empire’ (285). Here one encounters the limits of the ethnocentric anthropological imagination (a potential problem with all historical and transnational studies). The traditional Protestant hostility to superstition and idolatry was directed at non-Christian others, especially in the era of the English Civil Wars when ‘anti-popery and anti-puritanism began to accelerate in England’ (291). Concentrating on English attitudes toward Islam, Bulman shows how the vocabulary of anti-puritanism and anti-popery was used to understand the Ottoman enemy. Bulman pays especial attention to Sir Paul Rycaut, whose works influenced Enlightenment thinkers and portrayed the Ottoman empire as a tyranny enabled by ‘[p]opish and puritan doctrines, ceremonies and political strategies’ (294). For him ‘Ottoman piety was … a potent combination of the excesses of puritans and papists’ (295). Thus Islam was a priest-hidden religion with a ‘materiality … [that] mirrored that of Catholicism’ (295) and a predestinarian ‘false providentialism’ (296) that was puritanical. The writings of other travelers from the later Stuart era on followed the lead of those who had written about the Ottoman and Moroccan empires (299), for example, seeing “[t]he Mughal world … [as] a theatre of popery, puritanism, priestcraft and despotism’ (299). ‘The movement from post-Reformation to Enlightenment’, Bulman argues, ‘or from anti-popery and anti-puritanism to anti-priestcraft and anti-enthusiasm, solidified in the second half of the eighteenth century’ (300). He concludes that ‘commentaries on other religions were also clearly intended to serve as coded commentaries on the English scene’ and that these ‘processes encouraged the emergence of universal stereotypes’ (302). Bulman thus points to an important change that marked a new cultural era and demonstrates how older stereotypes could be put to new domestic and international uses.
In the Coda to the collection, Yamamoto, Lake, and Jovchelovich emphasize the point that ‘stereotypes are not just perceptions gone amiss, but rather a relational process of sense-making and meaning development through which social actors act purposefully in social fields’ (312). The essays that they have gathered illustrate the insights of social psychologists who emphasize the ways stereotypes are ‘rhetorical, polyphasic, and argumentative representations, dependent on the concrete uses to which they are put’ (313). It is, they conclude, futile to try to eradicate them because of their ‘centrality … to human thinking, society and culture’ (314). This is less a deplorable fact, one might conclude, than a challenge for historical and anthropological interpretation. When Michel Certeau stated that ‘the imaginary is part of history’ he pointed to the limitations of positivist empirical history, but he also opened up for interpretation the products of the irrational imagination, which make sense as part of lived experience and sense-making. Yamamoto’s interdisciplinary collection takes stereotypes seriously as human creations and demonstrates that they have a history from which we can learn much.
