Interpreting the event: baptism, networks and polemic in Commonwealth England

This article examines a set of texts that circulated around a debate between Richard Baxter (1615-91) and John Tombes (1602-76) about the lawfulness of infant baptism and church membership. The relationships between these manuscript and printed texts and the debate as an event are described and assessed demonstrating the ways in which knowledge networks were constituted in Commonwealth England and how they contributed to changing definitions of political and ecclesial communities, the role of baptism as a sacrament in effecting transformation and staking out boundaries, and the formation of publics that were increasingly theologically informed and polemically engaged. Considering these richly documentary texts, which exist in a reciprocally generative relationship with a well-known historical event, as material embodiments that work rhetorically in the world enables a more robust account to be given of the people, texts, objects and networks that collaboratively redefined baptism, church polity, and their associated practices.