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English Notes Restoration Literature Notes

Religion In Bunyan & Winstanley Notes

Updated Religion In Bunyan & Winstanley Notes

Restoration Literature Notes

Restoration Literature

Approximately 39 pages

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PAPER 5 - RELIGION IN BUNYAN & WINSTANLEY GERRARD WINSTANLEY (1609 - 1676) 1648 -52: writes 20 + pamphlets / letters / broadsheets trying to estephesablish new commonwealth on earth 1649: The New Law of Righteousness 1649: The True Levellers Standard Advanced - "In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve, Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man ... not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another" 1650: Fire in the Bush - "as yet the power and dominion of the Prince of Darknesse rules everywhere" and "the Dragon is not yet cast out" 1652: The Law of Freedom in a Platform Sees righteous action on the land = essential to revolution i.e advancing Kingdom on Christ on earth AND within individuals - "Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down" Leader + Will Everard of Diggers - poor laborers who dig on St George's Hill in Surrey 1st April 1649 Established 10 communities in 1649--50 to eradicate tyranny of private landowners Distinguished from The Levellers as TRUE LEVELLERS whose political programme never inc redistribution of property WS was "Declaring Freedom to the Creation" and of uprooting "Tythes...Lawyers....Fees....Prisons and all that Art and Trade of Darkness" and to make "The Earth a common Treasury" (1st seen in NWR) The New Law of Righteousness 1649 Associates new Law with "inward testimony" and experience of Living Spirit (see Milton, resembles georgic radicalism + spiritual inwardness of P.Rg). Compares inward authority with sneaky public preachers 'formal learning' is despised as false 'hirelings' Recalls weak + enslaved past as : "a blind Professour and a strict goer to Church, as they call it, and a hearer of Sermons, and never questioned what they spake, but believed as the learned Clergy (the Church) believed"; And how now he speaks and writes only "from an inward light and power of life within" Richly metaphorical draws on vivid tropes from natural world + scripture --reworked allegorically to convey urgent sense of social / spiritual conflicts The Law of Freedom in a Platform - 1652 Feared that even after CW's Pride's Purge and the Repub. Revolution "Kingly power exists in power still in the hands of those who have no right to the Earth then ourselves"

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