John Owen’s Milton

Gribben, Crawford

doi:10.1111/milt.12354

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…48 While it is impossible to know when or whether Owen purchased or read these volumes, the influence of Paradise Lost on his thinking about the sufficiency of Scripture and the possibility of angelic revelation is evident in the first volume of his commentary on Hebrews, which appeared immediately after Milton's epic. 49 Owen owned copies of modern English prose works, including three copies of Marvell's Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672) and another of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), in the publication of both titles he assisted, as well as Milton's History of Britain (1677), in addition to such Latin texts as Milton's Defensio (1651) and Epistolarum familiarium liber unus (1674). 50 Owen's theological writing inspired some literary work: Ter tria (1658), a long poem on the Trinity by the Independent minister Faithful Teate, responded immediately to the proposal in Owen's Of Communion with God (1657) that believers could enjoy fellowship with each person of the Godhead individually, while Thomas Gilbert, an Oxford divine, composed the Latin poems that were published as a preface to Θεoλoγoυµενα παντ oδαπα (1661) and that appeared on Owen's gravestone (1683).…”

Section: A Godly Literary Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Just as Owen read widely and may have been influenced by Milton, so members and adherents of his congregation, including Hutchinson, engaged with a wide range of writing and developed influences of their own, a trend that became especially evident in the period after his death in 1683. 79 The difficulties that members and adherents of Owen's congregation faced are evident in their commonplace books. Hutchinson kept several commonplace books, in which she preserved her memoir of her late husband as well as her literary and theological work.…”

Section: An Expanding Literary Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Order and Disorder, 3: 538(49). For an exposition of the Reformed scholastic doctrine of divine simplicity, which refers to Owen's exposition of the theme, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics, vol.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Lucy Hutchinson, John Owen’s Congregation, and the Literary Cultures of Nonconformity

Gribben

2022

The Review of English Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article advances the reconstruction of the ‘literary culture of nonconformity’ by examining activities of memorializing and collecting within the congregation with which Lucy Hutchinson was associated in the 1670s. This congregation, led by John Owen, retained a distinctive political culture. In spring 1673, its female adherents included the widow and daughter of former members of the Council of State, while the 15 men in membership included one former Lord Chancellor of Ireland, two members of the first Protectorate Parliament, three former Major-Generals, other former officers, several of whom after the Restoration had been imprisoned, as well as a younger man who would be elected to the three Exclusion Parliaments. Their literary work provides a critical context for Hutchinson’s projects in collecting, writing and translating in the 1670s. Throughout this period, and thereafter, congregants kept commonplace books with political, theological and biographical materials, gathered collections of transcriptions of Owen’s sermons, and took notes on his published works, largely independently of one another, while engaging with the broader literary and scientific cultures of the period. This activity paralleled that of Hutchinson, who nevertheless retained a critical distance from the fellowship with which she associated. But the evidence of these commonplace books speaks to the difficulties of the situation of dissent and suggests that some members found the congregation’s religious expectations increasingly difficult to sustain.

show abstract

Section: A Godly Literary Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Expanding Literary Culturementioning

confidence: 99%