"A Meer Imperial or Ecclesiastical Machine": Marvell and the Council of Nicaea in 1676

• In Event: Marvell III: Marvell and Religion

Abstract

In 1676, Andrew Marvell published Mr Smirke with the appended A Short Historical Essay, Touching...Matters of Religion, in which Marvell satirized the proceedings of the Council of Nicaea. The work resonated with the persecutory attitudes of the Anglican hierarchy and chimed with a wave of interest in the Council itself. Although Thomas Hobbes had composed his Historical Narration concerning Heresie... in the late 1660s, by 1675 the bookseller William Crooke was advertising that he held the manuscript of the Narration, and we know that in 1676 Marvell’s patron, the earl of Anglesey, arranged for a copy of it to be made and sent to Bishop Thomas Barlow for comment. This raises the intriguing possibility that Marvell had read Hobbes’s Historical Narration before composing his own Short Historical Essay. This paper considers that question against the backdrop of the intellectual traffic of that year.

Author

• Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester