The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on August 4, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp054
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
Tales of Tub Preachers: Swift and Heresiography
University of Exeter
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Abstract |
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What is the relationship between Swift's satires on enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and the literary tradition of polemical heresiography? Scholars have looked to contemporary contexts for Swift's satires in pamphlet literature attacking the 1689 Toleration Act and to a tradition of ‘Anglican’ rationalism stretching back to the Elizabethan period. Such informative studies do not help to explain why the Tale was itself received by some contemporaries as irreligious and even deistic. It is of course literary form that distinguishes Swift's works from conventional modes of anti-sectarian polemic and satire: authorial and narrative voices are themselves made the objects of satire. This article argues that one of the reasons why Swift's satires met with a hostile reception is that they parody not only sectarian activity but voices of anti-sectarian polemic. Swift owned all three volumes of the most famous heresiography of the seventeenth century, Thomas Edwards's Gangraena (1646). The work of a Presbyterian cleric, the Civil War heresiography Gangraena was much quarried by Anglican polemicists during the Exclusion Crisis and beyond, not only because it provided a compendium of sensational sectarian activity but because, in the very different context of the 1680s and 1690s, it allowed them to use Presbyterian literature against Presbyterian arguments for toleration. A comparison of Gangaena with the Tale and the Mechanical Operation offers a new perspective on the perplexing and provocative textual form of Swift's satires, and also on his crucial inclusion of his narrators in the sectarian madness that they admiringly describe.