In this handsomely published (though pricey to North American readers) and richly illustrated volume, the Muggletonians, a little-known religious sect with origins in seventeenth-century England, reappear. Muggletonians were followers of Lodowick Muggleton (1609–1698) and John Reeve (1608–1658), millenarian writers who spawned a religious movement that survived down to 1979 when the last of the sect, Philip Noakes, died. Their teachings have now taken on a new life through 89 volumes of archives material discovered on Noakes's farm in Kent and transferred to the British Library. In recent historiography, Christopher Hill and other seventeenth-century specialists had known and written about them; Michael Watts, Richard Greaves, and Patrick Collinson all catalogued them in their treatments of the various sects comprising “dissent”; T. L. Underwood produced an edition of Muggleton's memoirs that I have found a useful reference tool, and now William Lamont has brought them into focus in his “horizontal history” that shows much admiration for the work of Christopher Hill.

In six illuminating chapters, Lamont brings the Muggletonians out of their archive and into a “proper” historical context. Initially, Muggletonianism is characterized in seventeen assertions encompassing pacifism, new interpretations of hell, angels, the Elect, and the Serpent, a new form of dispensations, a vehement anticlericalism, and a redrawn eschatology that emphasized mortalism. In another chapter the author draws a contrast with Quakers, who held to a different morphology of conversion and believed in the immortality of the soul. Lamont even goes so far as to accuse those who previously thought of Muggletonians as a form of Quakerism of intellectual laziness. John Reeve's writings do reveal a kind of Quakerish religious enthusiasm and proselytizing, but there was a distinct difference between the Quakers' “inner light” and the Muggletonians' “spiritual light.”

The chief theological contribution of the Muggletonians was the reinterpretation of the Apocalypse—namely that John Reeve and Lodovick Muggleton were the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11. The Two Witnesses announced the advent of a “Third Commission,” that of the Spirit, which was derived from the Apocalypse. This commission (a type of dispensation) followed the earlier “commissions” given to Moses in the Law and the Apostles in the Gospel. The original vision of the Two Witnesses conveyed the impression that the Cromwell Revolution was the establishment of the kingdom of Christ through Christian civil rulers. Here the Muggletonian position follows closely those of Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and some Baptists before 1655. Following the Restoration, however, Muggleton and his following were left to reinterpret events in increasingly disjointed ways, ultimately teaching that the end of the world was a long time off. In the 1660s the Muggletonians were deeply divided internally; when Lodowick died at the end of the seventeenth century, his mantle fell to Thomas Tompkinson, who busied himself with attacking false Christians, the National Church, witchcraft, and Calvinists. A succession of others followed. Noteworthy were William Cates and Thomas Robinson in the Victorian era, who were renowned for their opposition to public worship and their belief that prayer was futile. In the late 1860s there was a notable shift in the Muggletonian movement in that outsiders became part of the narrative. The brothers William and Isaac Frost widely published the writings of the Witnesses beyond the group itself. Outstanding among the new devotees was Alexander Gordon, a Unitarian historian who defined the Muggletonians for the British Dictionary of National Biography. Lamont argues finally that two world wars and inadequate hermeneutics cost the sect its last chance in the twentieth century. By the 1950s there was more interest in the Old Muggletonians than in the surviving members.

Although the narrative suffers at points from mild turgidity and overindulgence in references to historical colleagues, which is not enabled by an adequate subject reference index, this foray into Muggletonianism is a must-read for several reasons. First, in the archived materials, Muggleton reveals much about the Puritan circles in which he traveled. He exemplified the quiet growth of Puritanism beyond its origins and, as a result, we bump into the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Lawrence Clarkson, John Milton, William Blake, William Penn, Richard Baxter, and even Benjamin Franklin. Second, the role of women in dissent is given new detail, as many of Muggleton's correspondents were female. Women appear in a variety of circumstances, including the trials of widowhood, needing advice on estate probation, matchmaking, and theological interactions. Third, Lamont warns of the perils suffered by other biblicists in the seventeenth century of taking the Bible too literally and asserts that, with a single bound, the Muggletonians leaped into more imaginative interpretations. While this may be salve for non-fundamentalists, it offers little comfort to serious apocalyptic scholars. Finally, Lamont tells us that Muggletonians were not true millenarians at all, largely because the Two Witnesses did not set specific dates for endtime events and did not seek to evangelize in light of the Second Coming. They were both merely to announce and testify in the sense of prophets. Their following was composed of seeker-disciples who validated their teachings in each generation by publishing their books and commenting on current events. A kind of elite, the Muggletonians yearned to be part of the once and future community that Muggleton and Reeve envisioned. Understanding the Muggletonians over the entire course of their history, therefore, helps us to place both Ellen G. White and David Koresh in proper context. That is a significant achievement for a variety of readers.