'Learn and sing for his solace': John Flavel and the Mediation of Ministry into Verse for the Religious Communities of South Devon

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 27; pp. 33 - 53
• Main Author: Clifton, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Mediation; Meditation; Occupations; Poetry; Prose; Religion; Religious literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

John Flavel and the Occasional Meditation Both Navigation Spiritualized and Husbandry Spiritualized, which were popular in their time, have been overlooked by modern scholarship in favour of Flavel's more enduringly popular treatises on loss and faith which are today published and studied by Presbyterian and Reformed theologians, with the result that Flavel is relatively unknown as a writer of meditations and verses.6 The practice of meditation was strongly associated with text, notably scripture, and practitioners employed verse and prose as means to process and memorialise their thoughts, though no distinct textual form for meditation was proposed.7 Elizabeth Clarke and Jonathan Gibson note that women drew on forms afforded them by their education and social circle just as men drew on forms associated with their professions, resulting in a plurality of forms.8 Nevertheless, studies and publications of meditative writing have tended to divorce verse from prose and have concentrated on the metaphysical poets.9 Consequently studies of meditative verse have tended to view these poems as literary outputs and to compare discrete poems against rhetorical paradigms drawn from rigorous Catholic and scripturally based meditative practices.10 These 'literary' poems are sometimes referred to as deliberate meditations in contrast to occasional or extempore meditations, although in practice these discrete categories are less well defined.11 The occasional meditation, used by Flavel and favoured by many Nonconformists, was a looser rhetorical form founded in describing and spiritualising observations in the created world much like Christ's parables. By mediating his ministry into the popular, though nominally private, form of the meditation and moral, rather than religious, verse Flavel avoided the more politically loaded forms of the sermon and hymn.14 In his prefatory poem 'The Author to the Reader', Flavel stresses the absence of politically sensitive polemic and his encouragement of meditative reflections: 'On Times, or Persons, no Reflection's found; | Though with Reflections few Books more abound' (11. In addition to the internal disruption of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Anglo-Spanish Wars of 1625-30 and 1654-60, and Anglo-French War of 1627-29 periodically restricted English access to continental markets, depleted the population of sailors, and impoverished victuallers as central government refused to pay fees, causing a long shadow of hardship and local resentment.16 In addition, fish stocks plummeted during the little ice age, and fishing trips grew longer.17 Indeed, as early as 1597 Dartmouth ships had been making trips to Newfoundland and Maine in search of fish for the salt-cod trade, and, by the late seventeenth century, Dartmouth was increasingly reliant on victualing ships for longer and more precarious journeys to the fishing waters of the North American coast.18 This industry was stimulated by the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 which gave English ports a monopoly on trade with English colonies and exempted fish from taxation.19 Whilst the industry was potentially lucrative to investors, deregulation, long-distance intercontinental travel, and inhospitable waters placed ordinary sailors and their families in an unstable employment situation and agricultural labourers at the end of a long chain of creditors.20 The Dartmouth of the 1660s and 1670s comprised a community which was socially cosmopolitan owing to its outward, intercontinental connections, occupationally itinerant, and economically dependent on the literal ebbs and flows of the colonial salt-cod trade. David Butcher suggests seafaring life was conducive to Nonconformist religion owing to time away from home ports and the influence of international exchange.21 Nonconformity in Devon was not immune, however, to the religiopolitical changes which swept across England following the Restoration of the monarchy.22 Flavel was ejected under the Act of Uniformity (1662), and began a semi-itinerant life centred on the parish of Slapton following the Five Mile Act (1665).