Richard Haydocke’s inventions and Jacobean religious neutrality

Abstract

This article examines documents surrounding King James’s 1605 interrogation of Richard Haydocke, a Puritan famous for giving sermons in his sleep. I show that the king wanted to hold Haydocke responsible for statements that were subversive but also rumored to be divinely inspired, and that he therefore developed an intriguing rationale for considering revealed knowledge as a human invention. My findings contribute to scholarship on Stuart political thought by documenting an instance in which James commits himself to a constructivist conception of culture unusual for a divine right theorist. By documenting an early modern attempt to theorize the regulation of religiously motivated political speech, they also contribute to a history of concerns associated today with debates about the limits both of secularism and of postsecularism.