The Puritan Challenge to the Status Quo
The World Turn’d Upside Down, a pamphlet printed in London in 1647, satirizes the Puritan notion that the contemporary world was deeply flawed. The pamphlet refers to the “distracted Times” of the Puritan Revolution in England. The drawing on the title page ridicules criticisms of English society that also were common among New England Puritans. Courtesy of the Trustees of The British Library.
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READING THE IMAGE: The drawing shows at least a dozen examples of the conventional world of seventeenth-century England turned upside down. Can you identify them?
CONNECTIONS: Puritans would claim that the artist had it wrong — that the conventional world turned God’s order upside down. How might the drawing have been different if a devout Puritan had drawn it?