'The Mad Crew': the Ranters and the Rhetoric of Madness (1648-1660)

This study examines the writings of the Ranters in the context of mid-seventeenth-century perceptions of madness. The Ranters were a group of dissenting Protestants that emerged during the English Commonwealth (1649-1660). They, like other English dissenters in this period and in centuries to come, were abused and discredited through allegations of mental illness.

Yet the Ranters accepted this accusation. Abiezer Coppe (1649) addresses his prophetic religious polemic not only to those with 'a soft heart' but also 'a soft place in [their] head'. This embracing of irrationality manifests in their rhetoric.

Within one page, Laurence Clarkson (1650) asserts that his argument 'by Reason is confirmed, and by Scripture declared', while also maintaining that 'the censures of Scripture, Churches, Saints, and Devils, are no more to me than the cut(t)ing off of a Dogs neck'.

The Ranters are an overlooked group of writers, usually confined to odd chapters and paragraphs in sweeping studies of the literature of the English Revolution (Smith, 1989; McDowell, 2003). Some historians debate whether the Ranters even existed as a historical 'movement' (Davis, 1986). Recently, however, Hessayon (2022) has sought to reframe this debate, suggesting that 'it might be better to reconceptualise the Ranters as an assortment of spiritual and temporal communities, sometimes overlapping and given added cohesion by their adversaries'.

My study contributes to the rhetorical and psychological dimensions of this reconceptualization through close literary analysis of Ranter texts in their precise polemical contexts. Are the Ranters best defined not merely by their dissenting views in religion and politics, but also by a shared manic style? In answering this question, I will engage in close readings of the works of Abiezer Coppe, Lawrence Clarkson, and more neglected figures such as Joseph Salmon, Theaurau John Tany (aka Thomas Totney) and William Erbery, comparing the radicals to each other, and to contemporary anti-enthusiast literature such as 'The Ranters Declaration' (1650) and 'The Ranters Bible' (1650).This contextual approach differentiates my study from Hawes' (1996), whose understanding of Coppe and seventeenth-century perceptions of madness is deracinated from the pamphleteering environment of the 1640s and 1650s.

My rhetorical analysis will be bolstered by quantitative evidence derived from comparing the linguistic features of Ranter, Baptist, and Presbyterian corpora; to that end, I will use corpus linguistics methods of analysis to define and compare the groups' differing sociolects.

This rhetorical and sociolinguistic approach has much to offer the wider study of madness in the seventeenth century. Although Macdonald (1981), drawing chiefly on doctors' notes, remains an important point of reference, I follow Hodgkin (2007) in focusing on the written experiences of those deemed 'mad'. The Ranters present a fascinating example of a porous and contested community of mental difference; close reading will not only reveal how contemporary perceptions of madness were registered by them, but also how such perceptions were actively transformed and rhetorically utilised in their writing.

I hope this study will prompt future research into the interplay of radicalism and madness in later figures such as Christopher Smart and William Blake.