Although not all Christians at all times nor all denominations and sects pay equal attention to the apocalyptic literature in scripture, it is surely the case that both the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and the Revelation of St. John in the New remain of perennial interest: witness the reception of Elaine Pagels's latest book. In the present volume Warren Johnston has set out to examine apocalyptic works in England between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and 1700, a period that encompasses the return of Charles II, the restoration of the Established Anglican Church, and the creation of Dissent, the years of the popish plot and the Exclusion Parliaments, the ill-fated and brief reign of the Catholic James II, which culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and the early years of the reign of William and Mary—a period of forty years marked by instability in both church and state.

While Johnston suggests that there has been a tendency to see 1660–61 as a watershed marking the end of revolutionary apocalypticism with the defeat of the Fifth Monarchists, he sees apocalyptic thought continuing through the Restoration era. Further, apocalyptic sermons and tracts of all ideological stripes were marked by a historicist reading of the prophetic texts modeled largely on the scheme of Joseph Mede's Clavis Apocalytica, dating from 1627 but reprinted after the Restoration; however many authors might differ on which events foreshadowed in the prophecies had already taken place or were yet to come. As Johnston notes, “[t]he principal contentions of this book are that the apocalyptic thought remained as means of understanding the political and ecclesiastical circumstances of later seventeenth-century,” which he suggests, following Mark Goldie, is not surprising, since “at least until the settlement of the Revolution of 1688–1689, these civil and religious circumstances were dominated by confessional concerns that continued from the first half of the century” (67).

Following a useful brief summary of the prophetic texts, particularly valuable if one confuses the seven vials with the seven seals and has forgotten whether the fall of Babylon precedes or occurs during the millennium, an introductory chapter lays out the historiography of English apocalypticism, on which Johnston's study builds. This is followed by a chapter on the tropes and conventions that structure the sermons, tracts, and treatises—Johnston cites more than 140—on apocalyptic themes in the later seventeenth-century. Subsequent chapters analyze the views of writers characterized as radical, the Fifth Monarchists and their ilk, and those who criticized their call for armed resistance to the Restoration, characterized as moderate nonconformists (Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers), and finally, the smallest group, the orthodox Anglicans. Later chapters deal specifically with the apocalyptic writings that were published as the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis unfolded and as the Revolution of 1688–89 occurred at the end of that fraught decade. A final chapter notes that works on the apocalypse continued to be published through the 1690s and beyond.

In attempting to navigate across such a vast landscape of texts and issues Johnston faced a formidable task. Despite the appearance of encyclopedic thoroughness, Isaac Newton's ideas about Biblical prophecy are not mentioned, perhaps because not published until after 1700, although the scholarship on Newton's apocalyptic thought is cited in footnotes. Obviously not all the writers mentioned could be treated with the detail accorded to Henry More, who quite fairly is considered a major expositor of apocalyptic views in the period, particularly for the Established Church. The need to cite so many sermons and tracts leaves the reader at times unable to distinguish when such terms as “Antichrist” or “the Beast” are part of a larger apocalyptic work or simply a well-worn term of opprobrium. Categorizing Dissenters ranging from Presbyterians to Quakers and Muggletonians as “moderates” involves lumping together mutually antagonistic groups, witness Richard Baxter's and John Bunyan's attacks on George Fox and the Quakers, an attack returned by the Quaker writer who called Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists Antichrists indiscriminately.

That said, Johnston does argue, and he is surely right in doing so, that “nonconformist authors were the most productive source of apocalyptic commentary during the Restoration,” as indeed they had been during the two revolutionary decades that preceded the return of the monarchy, but now with a different urgency, as nonconformists sought to place themselves within an apocalyptic framework as a source of patient comfort and an assured better future (91). Further, for all their differences most nonconformists united in condemning the resurgent Catholicism experienced in the brief reign of James II in apocalyptic terms, while, as Johnston notes, the “Protestant succession after 1689 made Catholicism a less imminent threat, and the Toleration Act to some extent allayed dissenters' anxiety about persecution” (224). Nevertheless, as Johnston goes on to demonstrate in his final chapter on the 1690s, works on the apocalypse, if at a lesser level of urgency and anxiety, continued to be published.

It is a sign of the times, if not of the impending apocalypse, that sentences such as the following find their way into print in works one suspects are no longer copyedited: “Popular intrigue concerning the number of the beast was not limited to calculation of the numeric letter values to equate to 666” (56). Conscientious authors of useful studies, such as Johnston, deserve better.