‘There Has Been a Scandal’: Cultural Performers and the Strangers’ Churches of London

ABSTRACT Despite what one might assume to have been a rigid line between London's refugee community—with its strict brand of Protestantism—and the city's performance cultures—often the target of strict Protestants' ire—historical records reveal a number of overlaps between those domains. In the daily lives of parishioners at the strangers' churches, expressions of cultural identity through the amateur performance of song and dance occurred with sufficient regularity that the consistories of the churches adopted rules to prevent such activities, seeking to constraint them only to liturgical or sanctioned contexts. In addition, despite those same rules and the strict Calvinism of the churches, many immigrants who were professional performers, at court and elsewhere, made the strangers' churches central to their spiritual and social lives. To recover the full story of performance culture in early modern London, we need to consider the activities of immigrant performers, both professional and amateur, and to do that, we must consider how the strangers' churches simultaneously shaped but also failed to contain or suppress those activities in their role as the dominant cultural, religious, and social institutions for early modern England's immigrant communities.