A talk by Professor Jeremy Smith, Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus, English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow.

The proposed research paper is part of a larger project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which attempts to identify keywords with religious denotations and connotations found in English writings in the British Isles during periods of exceptional religious upheaval, from the ‘premature reformation’ (Hudson 1988) associated with Lollardy to the Enlightenment and beyond.

New developments in digital humanities have now made possible much more robust historical research into English religious discourse than has been possible hitherto, notably the appearance of very large machine-readable historical corpora, which can in turn be analysed using innovative analytic tools. Examples include: Laurence Anthony’s AntConc corpus analysis toolkit (https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/); the Concept Modelling Demonstrator developed for the Linguistic DNA project (https://www.linguisticdna.org/), linked to EEBO-TCP (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/); Semantic EEBO (https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/), linked to the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE, https://ht.ac.uk/); and Lancaster’s Log-likelihood and effect size calculator (https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html).

This paper harnesses such tools. It deals with texts produced during a turbulent period, the late 1640s/early 1650s. These years saw the appearance of a remarkable outpouring of printed matter, reflecting astonishing religious (and concomitant socio-political) innovation. The world had been turned upside down by the conflict between king and parliament, and the beheading of the former at the hands of the latter: ‘It was a hinge in the world’s history. God was about to do something new’ (Ryrie 2017: 118). This paper illustrates the ways in which men and women at the time responded to what they perceived as God’s new message.