“The Armies Teares over Major Bethel”: Hugh Peter, Poetry and the New Model Army (Professor Alan Marshall, Bath Spa University
5:30pm - 6:30pm /
Thursday 9th May 2019
/ Venue: Lecture Theatre 8, Rendall Building
Type: Seminar /
Category: Department
/ Series: Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Dr Clare Downham
- Admission: Free. Book via Eventbrite.
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This lecture explores the Puritan preacher Hugh Peter’s techniques as a poet. It has at its centre an exploration of his neglected 1645 poem: The Armies Teares over Major Bethel. In the poem, Peter emerges as one of the first of many spokesmen for the Parliamentary soldiery. Indeed, by his poetic dramatizing of Bethel’s battlefield sufferings he showed how the soldier’s life and death could be used to heal the ravages of civil war and educate the civilian reader in God’s providences. Lastly, through this work Peter was able to begin the process of creative myth making of the New Model Army.