An important development in early seventeenth-century scholarship has been the unraveling by Peter Lake and David Como of venerable distinctions between clerical and lay, learned and popular, orthodox and heterodox, at least insofar as these applied to London. There, in the crowded alleys sheltered not only charismatic preachers but also questioning and discussion, negotiation and confrontation, in godly communities constantly in flux. The implications for the origins of Civil War radicalism are apparent, since the millennialist fervor of 1640–41 must for many in the metropolis have been catalyst rather than cause. But if clerical visions of the pastor heroically shepherding his flock were touched with fantasy, those visions, and the dichotomies they expressed, possessed real power. Challenges to clerical claims to a monopoly on religious initiative propelled godly stalwarts like Thomas Edwards, author of Gangraena (1646), into states of anxiety that shaded quickly into paranoia. The equation he and other clerical brawlers drew between (clerical) learning and truth had as its corollary the polemical assumption that lay participation and vulgar heresy—vulgar in every sense of the term—went hand in hand. Their nightmare, of a vibrant spiritual discursiveness in the vernacular, was to become the stuff of Christopher Hill's grand thesis; it has had a long half-life in modern accounts of the English revolution. By showing how intently laity and clergy might feed off one another, Lake and Como call into question Hill's assumption of a sturdy vernacular tradition. A parallel challenge to some of Hill's claims comes in Nicholas McDowell's (much) too sweepingly titled The English Radical Imagination.

McDowell's starting point is the Pauline emphasis on the triumph of the spirit and, above all, the dicta in 1 Corinthians that the world's weak will confound the mighty and that there is a holiness in simplicity. The appeal of those teachings to Oliver Cromwell, to the John Milton of Paradise Regained, and to an assortment of excited saints in the 1640s and 1650s, is obvious. But they had also been central to orthodox protestant controversy in the early days of the Reformation, and they retained their power as weapons for any who would criticize the establishment. The fast sermons of 1640–41 provide famous examples of their reach into the political center in a time of crisis, but McDowell—a literary scholar—focuses not on the contexts of the attack on learning's claims but on the enemy within. He provides a salutary catalog of those luminaries of the antinomian, or antitrinitarian, or mortalist fringe who did not come from the ranks of the artisans and craftsmen celebrated in Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), but had been at least lesser lights at Oxbridge: John Everard, Abiezer Coppe, and John Biddle stand out, but McDowell also explores Richard Overton's academic roots. As he points out, Milton was scarcely alone in his combination of high intellectualism and determined radicalism—and not surprisingly, since advanced scholarship has always been crucial to attacks on tradition. Though no university graduate, that Levelling tolerationist William Walwyn had devoured the leading European skeptics in translation and drew on their arguments to puncture scriptural dogmatism and overweening authority. More remarkable are the ecstatic inversions of the Ranter Coppe. Directly addressing “my Cronies, the Scholars of Oxford,” Coppe riffed satirically but insistently on Lily's Grammar, scattered Latinities through his works, and proclaimed truth in the semiotics of Hebrew. If the age of the Spirit was dawning, to bring with it an end to clerical hierarchies and entitlements, it scarcely heralded an end to learning.

Milton was not alone in his learned radicalism, but he did part company with the rest of McDowell's cast of characters in his admiration for the (reformed) educational curriculum. The blind poet's vision in his Pro Se Defensio (1655) of the graduates of grammar schools marching out against tyranny may strike us as fanciful, but for the likes of Overton, Walwyn, and Coppe it would have seemed dangerously wrongheaded in its faith in humanism. McDowell has a fine sense of the vitality and inventiveness of some (learned) radicals’ attacks on the curricular concerns of schools and universities after a century of humanist dominance had cemented the positions and the approaches of the protestant clergy. A final fascinating chapter suggests how close the university-trained Quaker Samuel Fisher stood to Spinoza and to what was to become English Deism. Fisher's challenges to scripturalism give further substance to the arguments of J. G. A. Pocock and others about radical origins of the Enlightenment, although the learned and sometimes ribald animadversions of Fisher's massive Rusticus ad Academicos (1660) remind us that, as with Coppe's incantations, the medium might sometimes obscure the message. The questions raised by Fisher's complex rhetorics also indicate that something is lost through McDowell's inattention to audience. He has done a great deal of detective work in obscure texts; we might attribute some of his display of learning to the doctoral thesis in which the book began, but might we trace that of Coppe or Fisher to something else, to a conviction that in an apocalyptic moment the soul of the literate elite was to play for? Much has been written about radicals’ arguments, but what of the audience for those arguments? Could it too be comprehended in the upside-down world depicted by Hill? If there was persuasive intent in, for example, John Owen's Latin Exercitationes contra Fanaticos (1658), and if Lake and Como are right, then perhaps not. Indeed, if important elements of learned culture were—or at least were widely thought to be—open to inversion, then the outrage that Coppe inspired may have been less concocted than J. C. Davis has famously argued in Fear, Myth and History.