We hear from time to time of mortalists, but they—for all that Thomas Hobbes and John Milton dwelt in their midst—have not enjoyed the kind of profile that scholars, over the past decades, have constructed for other dogmaticians of questionable orthodoxy. Surely one reason for this is evidentiary: English mortalist opinions predating the mid-seventeenth century need to be teased out of source material that is relatively scant and likely to be oblique, elliptical, or hostile. Another reason, doubtless, has to do with the doctrinal trickiness of the subject: mortalism presents itself in distinguishable strands, but it is often a fine scantling that separates one strand from another, and there may be difficulties in determining whether a given mortalist voice utters on behalf of the soul's “sleep” or the soul's “death.” Bryan Ball's book is the first dedicated study of early-modern English mortalism since Norman T. Burns's groundbreaking monograph of 1972, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton. Ball, a specialist in early-modern eschatology, generously acknowledges the high quality of the scholarship that informed Burns's monograph, and, fittingly, he frequently engages with conclusions drawn by Burns. But he establishes the need for a new account of mortalism: recent studies of likely subjects ignore mortalist dimensions that, by Ball's lights, should have been explored, and in several respects Ball takes his reader beyond significant limitations of scope and conception within which Burns had worked. He extends Burns's temporal range by looking back, briefly, to Wycliffite and Lollard theology, by compensating for Burns's “indefensible” (15) omission of John Locke, and by carrying the story of English mortalism through the eighteenth century. He considers texts, dating within the period studied by Burns but overlooked by the latter, whose anthropological language he considers either determinedly mortalist or at least susceptible of mortalist interpretation. He works into his doctrinal survey some coordinating narrative threads not evident in Burns: the seedbed of English mortalism was Anabaptist-inflected Kent and Sussex, whence emerged the most voluble Baptist mortalists of the mid-seventeenth century; the early preponderance of the soul-sleep strand of mortalism in England was destined for an overturning with the triumph of the more authentically mortalist soul-death strand, whose proponents carried the day—and eventually colonized the establishment—during the second half of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century.

Ball handles a technical subject with admirable clarity, authoritatively directing his reader through a concentrated and challenging intellectual environment, offering helpful explanations and assessments along the way. Mortalism concerned itself with the state of the soul following the death of the body. “Psychopannychism” maintained the mortalist view that the soul was not inherently immortal but insisted nevertheless that it was able to subsist, independently of the body, in a state of “sleep,” of unconscious “rest.” “Thnetopsychism” held that such sleep must be viewed metaphorically, that the soul suffered death and dissolution at the cessation of bodily life. Only at the general resurrection would the soul obtain the gift of immortality—the blessing that flowed from Christ's resurrection, made manifest at his second coming. Mortalist truth, so conceived, vanquished the vast fraud of the papist penitential system, and Ball capably articulates the polemical bite and the eschatological hope that energized the commitment to Christian mortalism. It is much to Ball's credit that he lays bare the ideological purchase of early-modern mortalism, and proceeds to offer accessible expositions of the (variously thnetopsychist) views of England's principal mortalists from the 1640s to the end of the eighteenth century.

Some shortcomings may be noted. Lack of evidence sabotages the thesis of mortalism's Anabaptist-driven Elizabethan spread. A lurching pen betrays the frustration of an unsubstantiated wish: “it is quite possible” that two Dutchmen martyred at Smithfield were mortalists; “it would be surprising indeed if mortalism, implicit or explicit, had not found its way across the Channel”; “perhaps” Bullinger's translator “may have seen [Bullinger's sermons] as a timely response to mortalism's growing appeal to English minds”; “in the absence of more conclusive documentary evidence,” the translations of Calvin and Bullinger provide “important glimpses into the existence of English mortalism in the later decades of the sixteenth century” (63–65, 67). Would that these plausible notions were sustained by sufficient evidence to clinch the case. Curiously, Ball does not send out a life-raft to the Muggletonians, whose condescending treatment at the hands of Burns recently drew fire from William Lamont (Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652–1979 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006], 86, 117–118). Lamont's remarks show us how congenial the thnetopsychist and adventist Muggletonian mind was to the sort of conceptual terrain inhabited by Ball's mortalists, but the Muggletonians are not treated in Ball's book and Last Witnesses is not listed in the bibliography. Other omissions include such interesting figures as Gerrard Winstanley, Jacob Bauthumley, and Laurence Clarkson, whose annihilationism had come within the purview of Burns (and Christopher Hill). Ball contends that “psychopannychism cannot be regarded as a true expression of thorough-going mortalism” and that this laurel must be awarded to thnetopsychism (21), which held that the soul, incapable of independent existence apart from the body, slept only in a figurative sense between death and resurrection. More thoroughgoing still, one imagines, is the theology of the annihilationists, who “alone,” Lamont observes, “are the true mortalists” (Last Witnesses, 117). Ball, however, doubting the “Christian” credentials of their mortalism (20), chooses to overlook them. Presumably this, too, is why Ball refuses Burns's lead in offering analysis of the Dutch founder and English followers of the Family of Love. Burns, for all his worthiness, “is rapidly becoming dated” (15): this adjudication serves Ball as a principal justifier for his own updated study. The risk that Ball must accept is that by excluding some unequivocal advocates of mortalism his reader will be left with little recourse but to turn for guidance, here and there, to an older book.