Cromohs Virtual Seminars

Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution

Nicholas McDowell
University of Exeter

N. McDowell , "Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-4
<http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/mcdowell.html>

1. The most sensible discussion of radicalism in the English Revolution is the third of G. E. Aylmer's four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society on 'Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England'. In his paper on 'Varieties of Radicalism', delivered in 1987, Aylmer quickly dispenses with the nominalist wrangling that continues to obsess historians. I quote his opening two sentences: 'Since the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may fairly be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church and society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream Puritan-Parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Assembly of Divines.'^[1] Aylmer immediately and with a minimum of fuss defines the context for discussing radicalism in the English Revolution. Having dispensed with the circular debate over naming, Aylmer proceeds to get on with trying to characterize the distinguishing features of mid-seventeenth-century radicalism.

Aylmer regards radicalism as what Glenn Burgess in his contribution above calls a 'functional' term of historical analysis. Of course Aylmer's functional definition still leaves us with problems, such as the case of Henry Ireton cited by Burgess (Aylmer excludes political Independents and moderate congregationalists but includes 'some religious Independents'). Yet it offers us a platform on which to build, while the nominalist argument will never get us beyond the foundations. In his very recent review article in the Historical Journal, 'Reassessing the Radicals', Tim Cooper returns us once more to Conal Condren's objection that 'radical' in seventeenth-century England was not used to mean innovative change and rather 'reflected its Latin root radix, which means to go back to the roots. As Condren observed, this is a conserving metaphor. Thus there were no conservatives and radicals, in the modern sense, only rival claimants to the discourse of conservatism.'^[2] This is essentially an argument about rhetoric: all sides sought to appropriate a set of rhetorical conventions but this does not mean the ideas which they couched in these conventions were not in themselves innovative. And it may not always be true. Aylmer concludes his address by quoting Humphrey Brooke's 1649 defence of his father-in-law, the Leveller leader William Walwyn: 'He hath studied the Peoples freedom so radically, and hath brought to light Principles so supportive thereof, and so essential thereunto, that no other Designe but their good, can with any Pretence be fixt upon him'.^[3] It is not clear to me that 'radically' is here used as a 'conserving metaphor'. But this is to play the nominalist game. Even if seventeenth-century people preferred never to label themselves as innovative radicals, it does not follow that we must never regard their ideas and actions as radically innovative in the context of their times. (To put it another way, according to the OED the term 'stereotype', in the sense of a 'preconceived and over-simplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person', was first used in 1922; does this mean we can never talk of stereotypes, whether of women, or Catholics, or Jews, in the early modern period?^[4])

In his discussion of my recent monograph The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), Cooper observes in a footnote: 'It is striking that at no point in the book does McDowell justify or clarify the use of the word 'radical', or why these writers qualify as radicals.' (250) It is interesting that Cooper's review is the first out of over twenty to have made this point, for my refusal to become involved in the nominalist debate was quite self-conscious. My silence was supposed to be a statement. If we are not to call 'radical' the writers I discuss at length in the book - the 'Ranter' Coppe, the Levellers Walwyn and Richard Overton, the Quaker Samuel Fisher, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers - then what exactly are we to call them? 'Sectarian' will hardly do, as the 'Ranters' were never a sect in the fashion of the Quakers, while the Leveller leaders, although they all emerged from activism in radical Puritan or sectarian circles, were interested in identifying what people had in common rather than what separated them. Anyway sectarians may not be interested in religious, never mind social and political, reform: William Lamont emphasises in his new history of the sect that the Muggletonians were 'neither revolutionaries nor millenarians'.^[5] As Ariel Hessayon sensibly points out in his contribution above, '[m]ost of us would probably regard these people ['Ranters', Levellers, Diggers] to have espoused ideas that were radical at various moments during the English Revolution'. I regarded it as a waste of time and space to spend pages in discussion of the validity of the term 'radical' when this is what everyone calls the figures I was writing about and when nearly everyone would accept they held ideas that we regard as radical in the context of the mid-seventeenth century. The fact that only one reviewer has called attention to my lack of discussion of the term makes, I would suggest, my point.

While Burgess expresses some regret that we are probably unable 'to find words and categories that cut less across the grain of the seventeenth-century past', he recognizes the need to leave the nominalist debate behind and get on with advancing our understanding of radicalism in the English Revolution. He is anxious to move away from what he calls a 'substantive' notion of radicalism, mostly associated with Marxist historiography, which posits 'a continuous radical tradition of definable identity.' While I agree with Nigel Smith and Timothy Morton that the 'period in English history between 1640 and 1832 was marked by some common conditions and characteristics, bestowing a consistency upon those who pursued a political or religious vision different from that required by the state', the Marxist vision of a continuous radical underground from Lollards to Levellers to the 1790s is really ahistorical and a priori and so always at risk of becoming unhistorical.^[6] Particularly helpful is Burgess's suggestion that a history of radicalism should emerge from study of the interaction between 'a history of events' and 'a history of languages and / or ideas'. This, he suggests, will lead us to recognize that radicalism in the English Revolution is not a consequence of a continuous underground tradition but develops from 'things as likely to reinforce as to subvert the commonwealth of pre-Civil War England.' Such an approach fits with the growing scholarly recognition that the relationship between 'orthodoxy' and 'heterodoxy' in early modern England, whether in terms of religious organization or intellectual exchange, is dynamic and symbiotic rather than static and oppositional.^[7] Although Burgess makes no reference to the literary studies of radicalism in the English Revolution which have emerged in the last twenty years, any methodology which places so much emphasis on 'a history of languages' must find a place for - indeed may even base itself upon - literary techniques of analysis. (Quentin Skinner's analysis of Hobbes's satirical tropes in Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996) was the logical development of his historiographical method of recovering the speech-acts that a text could perform in the historical moment of its composition and publication.) In what follows I outline my own fundamentally literary approach to radicalism and make claims for the value of this approach, arguing that it opens up new perspectives on the origins and nature, as well as the languages, of English radicalism in the 1640s and 1650s.^[8] 

2. One of the most famous passages in Areopagitica (1644), Milton's great protest against pre-publication censorship, is the eulogy of Civil War London as 'the mansion house of liberty'. In the midst of his defence of 'the men cry'd out against for schismaticks and sectaries', Milton imagines Londoners 'sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas ... fast reading, trying all things'. He emphasizes that these citizen-scholars are working people by using metaphors of artisanal and rural labour to describe their 'pursuance of truth and freedom': they are 'wise and faithful labourers' tilling 'a towardly and pregnant soile', 'fashion[ing] the plates and instruments of arm'd Justice', 'squaring the marble' and 'hewing the cedars' to construct the Temple of the Lord.^[9] London is at once a Hebraic 'City of Refuge', the spiritual centre of a 'Nation of Prophets', and a second Athens, where artisans who may lack a humanist education nonetheless act as both editor and exegete in the spirit of the classical humanist tradition. It is an exhilarating celebration of popular literacy as the apocalyptic instrument of Reformation.

Less famous is Milton's assertion earlier in Areopagitica that 'books of controversie in Religion' are the most dangerous because they spread an 'infection' that is 'most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the common people what ever is hereticall or dissolute may quickly be convey'd'. Milton's immediate polemical point is that pre-publication licensing is no protection against such infectious books because the hand-picked licensers are themselves more susceptible to heretical ideas than the 'ignorant': 'learned men be the first receivers out of books and dispreaders both of vice and error'.^[10] Yet the assertion that it is the 'learned' who interpret and convey the matter of heretical books to the 'common people' would seem to negate the radical energies of popular literacy in favour of a top-down model of heresy. Here it is the learned who come into direct contact with heresy by virtue of their literacy: the 'common people' come to heterodox ideas second-hand. (Moreover, they only get exposed to - or are perhaps only attracted to - the 'dissolute' aspects of these ideas.)

Milton's notion of heresy as transmitted from high to low, from the educated elite to the common people, challenges familiar historiographical and critical accounts of the emergence of radical religious ideas in the seventeenth century. These accounts have been inspired rather by the more memorable (and more positive) association later in Areopagitica of heresy with popular literacy. In The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and a series of eloquent, exciting and hugely influential books and articles over the latter half of the twentieth century, Christopher Hill represented religious radicalism during the English Revolution as a popular culture that evolved outside institutional educational and cultural structures. In the absence of effective state and ecclesiastical censorship in the 1640s, Hill argued, 'unorthodox men and women of the lower classes' were free to print, for the first time, views that had previously circulated orally in the radical underground. Although this was a period of 'glorious flux and intellectual excitement', the radical ideas surveyed by Hill were articulated by people who had little experience of or contact with early modern intellectual culture. Indeed by emphasizing 'reliance on the holy spirit within one, on one's own experienced truth as against traditional truths handed down by others', the radicals violently rejected the notion that a humanist education and a facility in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, conferred superior spiritual knowledge.[11]

Over the last twenty years radical writing during the English Revolution has become established as a legitimate category of early modern literary achievement.^[12] Every major anthology of English literature now has a section which has some extracts from Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists or the various women prophets. There will soon be a new dedicated, extensive literary anthology that traces the development of radical thought and style throughout the seventeenth century.^[13] The greatest influence on literary critics has been, and in many ways remains, the work of Hill, who had long argued both for the historical value of literary texts and for the literary qualities of the political and religious writing of the seventeenth century.^[14] Particularly influential has been Hill's contention in a lecture on radical prose style that radical texts brought 'the speech of ordinary people' into the previously elite sphere of printed opinion and were addressed to a popular rather than a 'Latin-educated or court audience'. They were designed to be read by 'craftsmen and yeoman' and 'read aloud to illiterate audiences'. Eloquent in its rough, natural simplicity, radical writing is seen to have its roots in 'utilitarian artisans' prose' rather than the grammatical and rhetorical training of the early modern schoolroom.^[15] Consequently radical literature has been valued by critics as a record of early modern popular belief that is not mediated through sources produced by the elite, the learned and educated few at the top of society.^[16] Radicalism has been associated with the experience of the culturally, as well as politically and socially, disenfranchised. In particular the opportunity for public expression granted to women by the sectarian conviction that women were the spiritual equals of men before God and that the simple and the weak were more likely to be subject to prophetic visions has been the focus of a considerable amount of scholarship.^[17]

3. The radical world of the English Revolution as depicted in literary criticism has reflected, then, the image of a world of labouring-class heretics projected by Milton in the 'Nation of Prophets' passage in Areopagitica - the phrase is in fact used by Hill as a chapter title in The World Turned Upside Down. How, though, do we account for Milton's alternative model in Areopagitica of the top-down transmission of radical ideas from the 'learned' to the 'common people'? To appreciate the culture of radicalism in the English Revolution we need to develop a greater understanding of how that culture was shaped not simply by conflict between the cultural worlds of the high and the low, of the learned and the unlearned, but by their interaction. As Aylmer suggested in his address in 1987, one of the ways in which we can begin to understand radical ideas more fully, and what they signified, is by exploring the pre-Civil War background and education of well-known figures (p. 5).^[18] Many of those who made important contributions to the extraordinary ferment of these years had been to university and so possessed a considerable level of formal education. As I have shown in The English Radical Imagination, some of these university-educated radicals drew on their knowledge of learned culture and their experience of institutional education to launch rhetorically elaborate attacks on those systems and structures of knowledge. Writers such as Overton (Queens', Cambridge), Coppe (Merton and All Souls, Oxford), Rogers (King's, Cambridge) and Fisher (Trinity and New, Oxford) express their heterodox religious ideas through satirical application of the cultural resources provided by their orthodox humanist education, or through the heterodox interpretation of learned texts - whether Latin grammars, academic plays, humanist satires or works of biblical philology - usually considered representative of orthodox values. They scramble and misapply the languages of the dominant culture for the purposes of parody and subversion, but also to develop and articulate new and radical modes of thought. Samuel Fisher, for instance, uses his extensive knowledge of oriental linguistics, developed in Caroline Oxford, to demonstrate the unreliability of the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament and so deny the clerical claim to superior religious knowledge on the grounds of a linguistic education. Paradoxically, learning is deployed to undermine the claims of learning and establish the virtue of inspiration.

Others in the radical spectrum had little or no formal education but were nonetheless in contact with and influenced by major European intellectual traditions through reading translations of classical and European authors, of which there were increasing numbers in the bookshops of Caroline and Civil War London. William Walwyn, who came from a comparatively prosperous background but did not go to university, read translations of the major texts in the French sceptical tradition, Montaigne's Essays (trans. John Florio, 1603) and Pierre de Charron's Of Wisdom (trans. Samson Lennard, 1606), that he bought in London in the 1630s. Walwyn uses these sceptical humanist texts to develop theories about the uncertainty of knowledge and the consequent necessity of religious toleration. This is a different instance of how heterodox ideas were formed from an interaction between elite and popular cultures. Yet as with the university-educated radicals, the instance of Walwyn's reading in the 1630s complicates Hill's theory that heterodox ideas had previously been transmitted orally for generations in a lower-class radical underground, bursting into public view in the 1640s with the greater publishing freedoms brought about by the breakdown of centralized authority. Indeed as new historical work by Peter Lake and David Como is revealing, heterodox beliefs were often circulating close to the Puritan mainstream in early Stuart England.^[19]

Of course the example of Walwyn, while illustrating the debt of radical ideas to 'elite' intellectual traditions, also suggests that Milton's vision in Areopagitica of 'popular' literacy in the service of religious and intellectual discovery was a historical reality in Civil War London. More work now needs to be done on both the intellectual interface between elite and popular categories of knowledge and the social interface between the learned and the merely literate. Another example of the former process is the role played by the writings of the Laudian divine Jeremy Taylor in forming the anti-Scriptural beliefs of Clement Writer, an infamous radical (and friend of Walwyn) who was accused by the Presbyterians of atheism.^[20] Writer, who had no university education, found in Taylor's writings scholarly and linguistic proofs concerning the unreliability of the Biblical texts which he could then ironically turn against his learned clerical opponents, who maintained that scholarship in Latin, Greek and Hebrew provided them with access to spiritual truth in Scripture that was denied to the unlearned. Taylor's aim in demonstrating the insufficient testimony of Scripture was to challenge Presbyterian certitude: the Anglican tradition of rejecting Puritan Biblical fundamentalism in favour of arguments from natural reason and probability which would complement those from Scripture stretches back to Richard Hooker. Writer appropriated Taylor's scholarship to develop a full-blown rejection of the authority of the Bible as a rule of faith. Ironically, then, ideas associated with the evolution of Anglican modes of thought were also used to elaborate and bolster sectarian, anticlerical and sceptical positions; although, importantly, Writer shared with Taylor a profound distaste for Calvinism, the dominant theological doctrine between 1640 and 1660. Writer's use of Taylor provides another striking instance of the role played by literacy in creating and shaping heresy in the 1640s.

4. An interesting distinction might be identified here between those university-educated radicals, such as Coppe, who employ their formal learning satirically to ridicule the claim that linguistic scholarship grants the clergy spiritual authority, and those without Latin, such as Walwyn, who similarly reject the identification of learning with spiritual insight but nonetheless gather the intellectual resources for their heterodox position from their omnivorous readings of vernacular texts, whether by French sceptics or Anglican divines. In truth the distinction is better made between the enthusiastic tradition of the Ranters and the Quakers, in which the very categories of reason and human learning are rejected as stumbling blocks to the supra-rational wisdom released by experience of the Spirit within, and a more politically directed radical tradition which encourages the common people to break free from intellectual and political subjection by exercising their reason. In this latter tradition, exemplified in the 1640s by the Leveller leaders Walwyn and Overton, issues of language and literacy are seen in relation to wider questions of political representation and social organization. To generalize, prophetic radicalism is a logical extension of Calvinist doctrine in that human nature and reason are seen as inherently depraved, even though the enthusiast and some of his or her fellow sectarians have been redeemed by the infusion of the Holy Spirit. Rational radicalism, on the other hand, is driven by an optimistic conception of man and his natural capacities; in Leveller thought this confidence in individual natural reason is a corollary of demands for an extension of the franchise and popular participation in the political process.^[21] Gerrard Winstanley the Digger, innovative as ever, straddles both radical positions by fusing an enthusiastic theology with a concept of universal grace and a practical plan for political, social and economic reform.

It is thus misleading to think of the rational strain of radicalism in the seventeenth century in terms of an extension of Calvinist doctrine. Radical Puritans distrusted the powers of reason because they viewed the human creature as inherently corrupt and sinful; Walwyn and Overton viewed all men as endowed with grace and the capacity to improve themselves and their society through the exercise of reason. If anything, then, these rational radicals were the heirs of the humanist, rather than the Puritan, tradition; of the Erasmian emphasis on man's capacity for self-sufficient rational virtue. Consequently they regarded education as essential to the spiritual and moral formation of all men, not merely of a clerical caste which would then instruct the laity in spiritual matters.^[22] What they objected to was the appropriation of the humanist curriculum to define ruling elites of church and state, bolstered by the equation of Latin literacy with social and religious hierarchy.^[23] Moreover, if education is the key to moral improvement, then reading must be unprejudiced and the circulation of knowledge must be free. Walwyn provocatively directed his clerical opponents to one of the most celebrated passages in Montaigne, the essay 'On Cannibals', to ridicule their lack of Christian charity:

And in his twentieth Chapter, pag: 102. he saies, speaking of the Cannibals, the very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnesse, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. These and like flowers, I think it lawfull to gather out of his Wildernesse, and to give them room in my Garden; yet this worthy Montaign was but a Roman Catholique; yet to observe with what contentment and swoln joy he recites these cogitations, is wonderful to consider: and now what shall I say? Go to this honest Papist, or to these innocent Cannibals, ye Independent Churches, to learn civility, humanity, simplicity of heart; yea, charity and Christianity.^[24]

Walwyn puts into practice Milton's argument in Areopagitica that, as Nigel Smith has put it, 'truth lies in the choices made available to the individual in the course of acquiring knowledge, that is reading'. Indeed while Milton ostensibly took it for granted that Catholic writings ought to be suppressed, Walwyn's catholic attitude towards books brings out the radical implications of Milton's assertion that '[t]o the pure all things are pure [Titus 1. 15], not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled'.^[25] This returns us then to the images of the 'Nation of Prophets' passage in Areopagitica; except now we can place those images in the context of a continuous interaction between humanist and vernacular traditions. As J. C. Davis has recently observed in a review of The English Radical Imagination, 'it will no longer do to contrast the bookish radicalism of the 1670s to 1690s with the untutored, plebian radicalism of the 1640s'; indeed we need to reconsider to what extent social, educational and political exclusion were 'necessary preconditions of radical activity.'^[26] Literary analysis of the rhetorical techniques and resources of some of the key texts produced by mid-seventeenth-century radicals reveals them to be sophisticated readers and writers who were not excluded from mainstream intellectual culture but rather appropriated aspects of that culture in a moment of historical crisis to develop languages of subversion, opposition and reform. 

Note

^[1] Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5^th ser., 38 (1988), 1–25 (1).

^[2] Historical Journal, 50, 1 (2007), 241–52 (247), citing Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

^[3] Brooke, The Charity of Church-Men (1649), in The Leveller Tracts, ed. W. Haller and G. Davies (New York: Columbia U. P., 1944), 345.

^[4] See N. McDowell, ‘Early Modern Stereotypes and the Rise of English’, Critical Quarterly, 48 (3), (2006), 25–37.

^[5] Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652–1979 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. xiv.

^[6] ‘Introduction’ in Smith and Morton (eds.), Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 1.

^[7] See e.g. P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); A. Hessayon and N. Keene (eds.), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

^[8] Some subsequent sections of this essay are derived from N. McDowell, ‘Humanism and Heresy in Milton’s England’, Literature Compass, 1, 1 (2004).

^[9] Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., gen. ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 2, pp. 554–5. Cited hereafter as CPWM.

^[10] Ibid., pp. 519–20.

^[11] C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1972]), pp. 13, 368 and passim; Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 69–71; Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 [1993]), especially pp. 196–252. See also Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’ in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume 2: Religion and Politics in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1988 [1986]), pp. 89–116.

^[12] For book-length studies, see N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); T. N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Pamphlet Wars: Rhetoric in the English Revolution, ed. J. Holstun (London: Frank Cass, 1992); The Emergence of Quaker Writing, ed. T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein (London: Frank Cass, 1995); H. Hinds, God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); C. Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Holstun, Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2 ); D. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); McDowell, The English Radical Imagination.

^[13] Seventeenth-Century Radicals: A Reader, ed. N. McDowell and N. Smith (Ontario: Broadview, forthcoming).

^[14] For an appreciation see M. Heinemann, ‘How the Words Got on the Page: Christopher Hill and Seventeenth-Century Literary Studies’, in Reviving the English Revolution, ed. G. Eley and W. Hunt (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 53–72.

^[15] C. Hill, ‘Radical Prose in Seventeenth-Century England: From Marprelate to the Levellers’, Essays in Criticism 32 (1982), pp. 103–5, 116, reprinted in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume 1: Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), pp. 75–95.

^[16] For a polemical defence of Hill's argument that radical writing of the English Revolution is important because it records authentic voices of lower-class protest, see J. Holstun, ‘Ranting at the New Historicism’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), pp. 189–225; Holstun, Ehud's Dagger, pp. 1–140.

^[17] Some of the most notable studies are E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 25–53; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, pp. 45–53; R. Trubowitz, ‘Female Preachers and Male Wives: Gender and Authority in Civil War England’, in Pamphlet Wars, ed. Holstun, pp. 112–33; P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Hinds, God's Englishwomen; Holstun, Ehud's Dagger, pp. 257–304.

^[18] David Como has recently shed much new light on the pre-origins of Civil War radicalism in Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Ariel Hessayon's work on Thomas Tany: ‘"Gold Tried in the Fire": the Prophet Theauraujohn and the Puritan Revolution’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1996).

^[19] See Como, Blown by the Spirit; P. Lake, The Boxmaker's Revenge.

^[20] N. McDowell, ‘The Ghost in the Marble: Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying (1647) and its Readers’, in Hessayon and Keene (eds.), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, chap. 9.

^[21] For further discussion of these strands in English radical thought, see N. McDowell, ‘Levelling Language: the Politics of Literacy in the English Radical Tradition’, Critical Quarterly 46(2) (Summer, 2004), pp. 39–62.

^[22] On the ambivalence in mainstream Puritanism concerning the role of reason and education in religion, see J. Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

^[23] See McDowell, ‘Levelling Language’; McDowell, ‘Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogy and Power in the Writings of Richard Overton’, The Seventeenth Century 18(2) (Autumn, 2003), pp. 230–51. On Latin as a badge of ‘class’, see F. Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign, trans. J. Howe (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 207–29.

^[24] Walwyns Just Defence (1649), in The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. J. R. McMichael and B. Taft (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 399–400.

^[25] N. Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5’, in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. D. Loewenstein and J. G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 106; CPWM, vol. 2, p. 512. Walwyn quotes Titus 2. 11–12 on the title page of The Power of Love (1643).

^[26] English Historical Review, cxxi, 495 (Feb. 2007), 189–90.

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