Jacob Bauthumley

Who was Jacob Bauthumley?

Jacob Bauthumley or Bottomley was a significant English radical religious writer, usually identified as a central figure among the Ranters. He is known principally for The light and dark sides of God. This work was regarded as blasphemous. After the Blasphemy Act of August 1650, he was arrested, convicted, and bored or burned through the tongue.

Bauthumley had served in the Parliamentarian Army; Norman Cohn states that he was in the Army while writing the pamphlet, and took part in Ranter and Quaker meetings in Leicestershire in the mid-1650s. Christopher Hill says he left the Army in March 1650. His family had earlier suffered ostracism, for permitting sermons by Jeremiah Burroughes to be said in their house; he was a shoemaker.

After the Restoration of 1660 he was a librarian in Leicester. He produced a book of extracts from John Foxe, published in 1676.