A CAPTIVE'S STORY: PURITANS,PIRATES, AND THE DRAMA OF RECONCILIATION

Abstract

This essay examines the use of Hebrew sources in debates on church and state in civil war England. It fits within a developing historiography that seeks to uncover the deeper texture of early modern political discourse, and also poses questions about the prevalence of statist and secular understandings of public power in the context of the English civil war. Its specific focus is on debates on church government in the 1640s, studies of the Hebrew commonwealth in the 1650s, and the use of Hebraism by Hobbes and Harrington as an antidote to clericalism.