Jacob Bauthumley

Jacob Bauthumley or Bottomley [1] (1613–1692) was a significant English radical religious writer, usually identified as a central figure among the Ranters. He is known principally for The light and dark sides of God (1650).[2][3] This work was regarded as blasphemous . After the Blasphemy Act of August 1650, he was arrested, convicted, and bored or burned through the tongue.[4]

Bauthumley had served in the Parliamentarian Army;[5] Norman Cohn[6] states that he was in the Army while writing the pamphlet, and took part in Ranter and Quaker meetings in Leicestershire in the mid-1650s. Christopher Hill[7] says that he left the Army in March 1650. His family had earlier suffered ostracism, for permitting sermons by Jeremiah Burroughes to be said in their house;[8] he was a shoemaker.

After the Restoration of 1660 he was a librarian in Leicester. He produced a book of extracts from John Foxe, published in 1676.[5]

Views

Bauthumley denied that the Bible was the Word of God,[9] and that Christ was more divine than other men.[10] He considered that the real Devil lay in human nature,[11] while God dwells in the flesh of man.[12]

Historian E. P. Thompson calls his views 'quasi-pantheistic' in their re-definition of God and Christ, and quotes A. L. Morton to the effect that this is the central Ranter doctrine.[13]

Notes

  1. ↑ Also Jacob Bathumley, Bothumley (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), Bauthaumley or Bauthumely
  2. ↑ The light and dark sides of God or A plain and brief discourse of the light side (God, Heaven and angels.) The dark side (Devill, sin, and Hell.) As also of the Resurrection and Scripture. : All which are set forth in their severall natures and beings, according to the spirituality of the Scripture. [WorldCat.org]
  3. ↑ Extract
  4. ↑ The Ranters
  5. 1 2 Radical Uses of History in the Restoration
  6. ↑ The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1970 edition p. 303-6, with extracts.
  7. ↑ The World Turned Upside Down, p. 208 of Penguin edition.
  8. ↑ Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (1994), p. 143.
  9. ↑ Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993) p. 234.
  10. ↑ Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), p. 293.
  11. ↑ 403 Forbidden
  12. ↑ Hill, Milton, p. 301.
  13. ↑ Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993), p. 26.
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