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In late December 1656, over the course of several days, the 38-year-old Quaker leader James Nayler was punished severely. He had been convicted of "horrid blasphemy" by the entire British Parliament after a ten-day meeting devoted to the consideration of his case. Having escaped a sentence of execution by only a very narrow margin, Nayler was pilloried twice and publicly whipped on three separate occasions, suffering over 300 excruciating lashes altogether. According to one report,

there was not a space bigger than the breadth of a man's nail free from stripes and blood, from his shoulders [to] near his waist. And his right arm was sorely striped. His hands also were sorely hurt with the cords, that they bled, and were swelled. The blood and wounds of his back did very little appear at first sight, by reason of the abundance of dirt that covered them, till it was washed off. … And others saw that he was much abused with horses treading on him, for the print of the nails were seen on his feet.

As if this were not enough, Nayler's tormenters bored his tongue with a red-hot poker and, among other afflictions, branded his forehead with a burning, iron-letter "B" (which event "gave a little flash of smoke"). They threw him in prison in London on a woefully indefinite basis and assigned him to manual labor to earn his keep. Though he was released on a general amnesty in September of 1659, he died pitifully the following year after being robbed on the highway while heading back to his home in the county of Yorkshire.

What had Nayler done to deserve such punishment? He had carried out a prophetic "sign" before the citizens of Bristol by re-enacting Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. During a "pelting downpour" in late October 1656 "in which they 'received the rain at their necks and vented it at their hose and breeches,' " a small band of four men and three women, all followers of Nayler, shouted hosannas as he rode slowly into town. They entered "'the dirty way in which the carts and horses and none else usually go,'" trudging "knee-deep in mire" due to the rain. Their blatant imitation of our Lord incited such outrage that they were arrested straightaway and held in jail until their hearing.

During his trial, Nayler insisted that he had only enacted a sign of Christ; he had not presumed to be the Lord himself. And in The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, Leo Damrosch confirms that "on the whole, … Nayler's testimony … should have convinced any fair-minded observer that he clearly distinguished between himself and Christ."

Damrosch has undertaken in this gripping historical monograph to explain what he refers to as "the meaning of the Nayler affair." Against the background of the political culture of the Interregnum period, he seeks to unpack the rich significance of Nayler's mistakenly blasphemous "sign." To his credit as a self-professed secularist, Damrosch refuses to reduce his discussion of the "meaning" of this affair to the terms of social-scientific explanation, treating the intense debate concerning blasphemy waged by Nayler and his critics as simply a cover for the expression of more important, social concerns. Rather, Damrosch argues, while "modern interpreters sometimes regard the worldly arguments as the 'real' ones and the religious ones as a coded translation of them," we must recognize that "such a distinction would have made no sense" to his book's early modern subjects. "In their minds religious considerations were worldly ones," for, in their world, religion and politics "ran in tandem."

What, then, was the real meaning of the Nayler affair? For Damrosch, the answer has several dimensions. First, the Quakers posed a very serious threat to the stability of the fledgling Puritan government. While not as radical or political as groups like the Levellers or the Diggers, they too blamed the Puritans for having "sold out the revolution." To their minds, what had started as a movement to oppose governmental oppression and put an end to religious "priestcraft" had become as elitist and controlling as the monarchy it had deposed. In protest, as the Quakers rose to prominence in the 1650s they practiced customs that defied the Puritans' newly established social order.

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