The editors of this exceedingly useful and engaging volume, which brings together some important examples of recent research on radical movements between circa 1640 and circa 1832, place a unifying emphasis on defining and situating radicalism. In their introduction, Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan undertake an etymological excavation and explore the difficulties inherent in using the language of “radicalism” to characterize seventeenth-century religion and politics. They highlight the “underutilized” definitions worked out in other disciplines, for instance, by some sociologists, who insist on the situational specificity of radicalism and do not burden the term with value-laden associations with progressive politics.

In the historiographical overview that follows, no individual approach appears to be favored, with the exception, perhaps, of Gary de Krey’s injunction to “recognize the existence of a variety of radicalisms” (10). In the end, a pragmatic conclusion is reached: the editors choose “to eschew definitions,” for while “we may not be able to define early modern English radicalism, … we know it when we see it” (13). They summarize eloquently, “what radical and radicalism give us with one hand—comprehensibility, coherence, and homogeneity—they take away with the other—anachronism, inconsistency, and heterogeneity” (13).

Despite its reluctance to make definitive claims, this volume does help to take the temperature of the historiography of radicalism. It confirms a general dissatisfaction with nominalist attempts to exclude the category of radicals and affirms the impulse to pluralize and contextualize “radicalisms.” Many of the essays illustrate how fluid the boundaries separating radicals from more “mainstream” intellectual currents often were. The contributions are also remarkably successful in their interdisciplinary aims, although they are, perhaps inevitably, weighted heavily toward the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

In the first of the essays, Nicholas McDowell illustrates the interactions between Laudian devotional aesthetics and antinomian mysticism, examining in particular the “surprising intellectual and literary connections” among Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh, Peter Sterry, and Abiezer Coppe. Not all will be convinced by his interpretation, which rests on some circumstantial evidence of influence, but his readings are otherwise theologically sensitive and rewarding in their own right.

Jason Peacey’s chapter, “Royalist Politics and Pamphleteering,” forcefully challenges the association of royalist allegiance in the Civil Wars with “conservative” political positions. Radical ideas, he argues, were forged in the volatile, reactionary climate of 1640s politics, rather than as abstract theoretical principles. More than any other, his contribution problematizes the use of “radical” and “radicalism” as historiographical shorthand, offering an intriguing glimpse into a world of royalist pamphleteering in which fundamental questions about political representation were being asked. In particular, he reconstructs through meticulous archival research the surprising “radicalism” of one Kentish royalist MP, Sir Roger Twysden.

A more familiar figure in the pantheon of Civil War radicals is the printer Giles Calvert, the subject of the third essay in which Mario Caricchio reconstructs the antinomian and spiritualist milieu that found its unofficial headquarters at Calvert’s bookshop, at the sign of the Black-Spread-Eagle. Refreshingly, Caricchio regards Calvert’s circle as a coherent movement sometimes labeled “antiformalist” or Seeker, which by definition rejected institutional formalization but which nonetheless represents an identifiable interest group with shared theological and social priorities.

In his discussion of Gerrard Winstanley’s General Baptist background, Ariel Hessayon opens up the depth and breadth of the contexts in which heterodox ideas were formulated. Winstanley’s christology, anticlericalism, (equivocal) doctrines of nonresistance, and attitudes toward the magistracy are situated in an existing tradition of theological radicalism with roots in the Radical Reformation. Hessayon’s illuminating series of comparisons between Winstanley’s thought and the Anabaptist heritage helps to restore the European dimension to the study of English radicalism.

Noam Flinker returns to the theme of radical discourse in chapter 5, which deals with Abiezer Coppe’s “midrashic” technique in his “collation of biblical texts that combine to shape a new entity in the language of the old” (127). Many of Flinker’s observations about the poetic/prophetic appropriation of biblical imagery in Coppe are not wholly surprising, although his interpretation of these texts as midrash is indeed novel.

The definition of Civil War radicalism beyond English borders is explored in the two chapters that follow: first, in relation to the British Isles, as Jim Smyth discusses the imperial outlook that united providentialists and republicans in their presumption of English superiority, and, second, in the context of seventeenth-century Italy, where the revolutionary radicals were held up (much as the Münsterites had been) as an object lesson in the horrifying consequences of religious toleration and civil disobedience. Stefano Villani traces the fascinating process whereby the English radical experience was translated for a perplexed Italian intellectual audience, through heresiography and travel writing and more directly through Quaker missionaries.

Sarah Hutton’s “radical review of the Cambridge Platonists” in chapter 8 offers a spirited revision of the nineteenth-century depiction of that group as moderate intellectuals “unconcerned with secular life and, at most, politically neutral” (164). Instead, Hutton points to the many points of contact among the so-called Platonists and not only pioneering thinkers such as Descartes, Boyle, and Hartlib but also radical political activists, theorists of toleration, and theologians.

While Hutton argues for the application of the “radical” label to the Cambridge circle, in the chapter that follows, Warren Johnston seeks to sharpen the definition of radicalism, showing that its common association with apocalyptic expectation is misleading. His survey of “apocalyptic ideas in late seventeenth-century England” covers a broad range of eschatological beliefs in Anglican and dissenting contexts, from millenarian nonjurors to Quaker prophets.

The uneasy negotiation between constructions of “moderation” and “radicalism” is tracked again through Sandra Hynes’s reading of the correspondence between the Dublin Presbyterian pamphleteer Joseph Boyse and a Dissenter-turned-conformist based in Leeds, Ralph Thoresby. The letters illustrate how religious identity could transcend particular contexts, and they bring into focus the tension between a local experience of being cast as a dissenter and radical and a wider sense of belonging to a catholic reform movement.

Giovanni Tarantino’s essay on Anthony Collins introduces a more modern type of radical, one who rejects any theological grounds for social and moral organization. Tarantino’s analysis of this most notorious freethinker’s political principles begins with an investigation into his private library, while acknowledging the problems in making “deductions about the philosophical, political or religious inclinations of its owner” (229), and moves to present an overarching characterization of Collins’s thought as essentially antiauthoritarian and subjectivist.

The final chapter, by Jason McElligott, expounding the social and political radicalism of the nineteenth-century satirist William Hone, at first sight seems a little out of place in terms of periodization, but in fact it helpfully illustrates the flexible meanings of early modern radical ideas when recontextualized. Hone’s use of seventeenth-century Royalist propaganda in the service of an antimonarchist reforming agenda in the 1810s demonstrates that, as McElligott concludes succinctly, “there is no such thing as a radical idea or book. … A radical book is merely one which is put to a radical use at a particular point in time” (259).