The Woman in the Wilderness the Further Development of Christian Apocalypticism

1 The Woman in the Wilderness The Further Development of Christian Apocalypticism

I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. —The Revelation of John, 22:13

Pope Urban II stood before an extraordinary assemblage of high Church officials and French nobles at Clermont in 1095 to implore them to come to the aid of Constantinople, beleaguered by a Seljuk Turkish army, and then liberate the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. “[A] ‌race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God” has long occupied the spiritual seat of Christendom, slaughtering God’s children “by pillage and fire,” he reminded them in stark, ominous tones. They have taken many survivors into doleful slavery “into their own country” and “have either destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of their own religion.” In language that was pointedly both apocalyptic and millenarian, Urban rallied the French nobles, who reportedly cried out, “God wills it! God wills it” as he promised that the Christian recovery of Jerusalem would mark the advent of the Millennium. While the French nobility was likely more motivated by the prospect of conquering “a land flowing with milk and honey,” commoners and peasants throughout Western Europe took the eschatological significance of what became the First Crusade to their hearts. With bloodthirsty zeal the crusading armies harried and massacred Rhineland German Jews on their way to Constantinople in 1096, some of the Christians doubtless taking literally the prediction in Revelation 19 that all who did not follow Christ would be “slain by the sword.” This notion further inspired them in the war against the Muslim population of Palestine as they carved out the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem by 1099, and embarked upon subsequent crusades that have come to characterize the history of medieval

A Dream of the Judgment Day. John Howard Smith, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533741.003.0002 The Woman in the Wilderness 13

Europe. The laity, and not a few of the nobility, believed that their endeavors had been predicted in the Book of Revelation, and would inaugurate the Millennium and Christ’s second coming.1 Medieval and early modern Christianity wrestled uncomfortably with Christianity’s fundamentally chiliastic nature. Just as second- and third- century Christians strove successfully to dissociate their religion from its radical Jewish roots in order to cultivate legitimacy, so did theologians of subsequent centuries strive to downplay lurid apocalypticism in favor of vague millennialism. Although the focus of the Christian life was always meditation upon the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, and while priests and theologians urged people not to waste time in expectation of the Second Coming, the magnetic imagery of the Book of Revelation inexorably gripped the popular imagination. The sometimes baffling language of the Bible, -par ticularly the prophetic texts, demanded interpretation. But for the common people, the imagery of seven-headed beasts, Christ’s glorious return armed for the final battle with Satan, and descriptions of so many signs presaging the dawning of the Latter Day are too compelling to relegate to the back of one’s mind. Some theologians could not resist the lure of apocalyptic analysis, and many laypeople yearned to witness the events of Revelation, while others sought to play leading roles in bringing them on.

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Patristic and Medieval Apocalypticism

By the close of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, Christian writers had shifted from the composition of gospels and apocalypses to the production of exegetical and apologetic works as they compiled the canonical Bible, and a leader among these early patristic authors was Lucius Lactantius (c. 250–c. 325) of Cirta in North Africa. A professor of rhetoric in Nicomedia, he enjoyed the patronage of the Emperor Diocletian, but the official persecution of Christians led to his becoming critical of the impe- rial government, and eventually his conversion to Christianity around the year 300. Resigning his post, he attracted the notice of the future Emperor Constantine, who became his patron and appointed him as tutor to his son. Lactantius garnered fame among his peers and those who came after him as the “Christian Cicero,” but he was soon overshadowed by the later “fathers” 14 A Dream of the Judgment Day of the Church who solidified Christian theology and compiled the biblical canon. His most significant work was Divinae Institutiones (c. 303–311), a standard Christian apologetic that is more noteworthy for its establishing the logical basis of civil law in Judeo-Christian morality and ethics than for its millenarian content. However, Lactantius argued that John of Patmos had been made privy to the actual events of the Apocalypse, and looked forward to the inevitable coming of a literal Millennium, prior to which Christian rulers are behooved to govern with justice and piety, which will achieve perfection in the Millennium. But his younger contemporaries and intellectual descendants were obviously uncomfortable with eschatological ruminations.2 Prior to the compilation of the canonical Bible, the earliest theologians wrangled not just with an array of apocalyptic texts, but with dozens of pur- ported gospels written by authors claiming to have been Jesus’s original disciples. The bulk of Christian apocalyptic texts appearing throughout the first and second centuries tended to retread Daniel, Ezekiel, and John, and the lattermost was singled out by the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Smyrna (c. 130–c. 202) for analysis in his four-volume Against Heresies (c. 180). Concerning the bizarre imagery and fantastical predictions in the Book of Revelation, Irenaeus ultimately concluded that the book can only be interpreted in allegorical terms. Another problem was the apparent anti- Roman bias of these texts, which made sense given the anti-Christian preju- dice of the Roman government in the first century. However, as Christianity grew in the second and third centuries, the hostility to Rome posed a significant challenge to its gaining acceptance and respectability. Thus a growing number of patristic interpreters argued against its being included in the burgeoning Christian canon, but its wide popularity led Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253) to argue for its inclusion so long as it was interpreted purely as allegory.3 Biblical prophecies were the means by which God conveyed vital infor- mation to humanity about the nature of the cosmos, including the track of future events leading to the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, and the end of the world. A growing chorus of theologians warned future exegetes, though, to avoid the trap of scouring Revelation and the other apocalyptic books for specific signs and clues to the actual date for the End. Thus was apocalypticism’s importance to the cultivation of a Christian life gradually de-emphasized. The best and most convincing argument on this point came from Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who commented frankly upon The Woman in the Wilderness 15 his struggle to interpret the Book of Revelation. Thus strongly inclined to circumspection in matters of prophecy, at the Synod of Hippo (393) and the Synod of Carthage (397) he asserted that the Revelation may be included in the canonical New Testament only if it is read allegorically rather than literally, thus following Irenaeus and Origen. Biblical exegetes must not, he warned, “fall into a panic over present happenings as if they were the ultimate and extreme of all things” so that “we may not be laughed at by those who have read of more and worse things in the history of the world.” Authentic prophecy, he insisted, had ceased with the close of the apostolic age, and the best that any Christian might do is focus upon his or her spiritual development, since the End will come whenever it does. Going further, he contended in De divination daemonum (c. 407) and more fulsomely in De civitate Dei (426) that from the present era onward, any “gift” of prophecy was conferred upon human beings by Satan rather than by God. Divination through the analysis of prophetic texts was little different from the various means of au- gury employed by astrology, the interpretation of birds in flight, the feeding of sacred chickens, and the reading of bird entrails still popular throughout the Mediterranean world. The Book of Revelation came to be included in the New Testament as an intriguing conclusion to the Bible, with which most theologians and preachers were loath to engage.4 Despite Augustine’s admonitions, apocalypticism did not die out as Christianity rose to greater heights of acceptance in the fourth century and eventually replaced Rome as a cultural touchstone following the collapse of the western empire in the 450s. Fascination with the Book of Revelation maintained its hold upon the Christian imagination, and several leading theologians tried their hand at interpretation. Most tended to follow an established consensus that the text is best understood as spiritual allegory, though hints at future events seemed clearly to be present. One focus of at- tention was upon the Book of Daniel’s description of four kingdoms in the prophet’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Dan. 2:36–44) and his vision of the four beasts (Dan. 7), which were equated to the succession of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. The fifth and final kingdom would be that of Christ in the Millennium. However, efforts to match current or recently past events to John’s predictions, or divining the identity of the Antichrist, were discouraged by the Church. Nevertheless, by the eighth century, the ever-ascending power of the Church led theologians to see the prophetic texts as presaging the rise and ultimate triumph of Christianity. In England, the Venerable Bede (672–735) used the books of Daniel and 16 A Dream of the Judgment Day

Revelation to undertake a chronological overhaul of world history in which he cast the Church as the protagonist, dividing history into periods corre- sponding to the numbers four and seven that figure so prominently in the texts. It would be this periodization that inspired all other apocalypticists who followed.5 The two most influential exegetes in the later development of European apocalypticism were the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and the Italian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). Hildegard, the Benedictine “Sybil of the Rhine,” claimed to have experienced prophetic visions since the age of three, and in 1142, while presiding as the abbess of a nunnery in Rupertsberg, she believed she received a direct order from God to write them down—something as yet unheard of since the apostolic era, and unprecedented on account of her gender. Supported by prominent bishops and Pope Eugenius III, she compiled her visions into Scivias (1151), which, along with being a reframing of Christian history and an interpretation of the Book of Revelation influenced by Bede, broke from the tradition of Christian triumphalism to predict the steady decline of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire under the weight of political corruption, greed, and worldliness caused by satanic infiltrations. The key events in recent history that mark the advent of what she called the tempus muliebre (“time of trouble”) were the Great Schism of 1054 and the German King Henry IV’s challenging of Church authority as he consolidated his power as Holy Roman Emperor in the 1070s and 1080s. Her conviction that the Church would steadily degen- erate until its rebirth prior to the Second Coming is all the more remarkable for its receiving papal endorsement, and speaks to how deeply the Investiture Controversy’s redefinition of the relationship between divine and civil authority shook established authority in the early twelfth century.6 Hildegard as an apocalypticist is best remembered for her vivid description of the birth of the Antichrist, whom she was careful not to attempt to identify. While John of Patmos made no attempt to describe the Antichrist except to note that he was a beast arising from the sea, the prevailing idea was that he would be a deceptively Christ-like figure. In a passage heavily reminiscent of John’s description of the “woman clothed with the sun” who gives birth to the true church, Hildegard identified the Antichrist’s mother as the Church, describing her as a loathsome woman with “various scaly spots” running between her navel and vagina, from which “there appeared a monstrous and totally black head with fiery eyes, ears like the ears of a donkey, nostrils and mouth like those of a lion, gnashing with vast open mouth and The Woman in the Wilderness 17 sharpening its horrible iron teeth. . . .” The birth is a violent, bloody one that destroys the mother utterly, but her contention that the Antichrist would emerge from the Church, rather than from the Synagogue, runs counter to the popular belief that he would be a Jew. This novel use of Revelation to crit- icize the Church would become a recurrent theme in subsequent apocalyptic writings.7 Joachim of Fiore was as concerned about the organization of time and history as Bede and Hildegard, and like the former he fixated on the prevalence of the numbers three, four, and seven in the Bible to compile an incredibly detailed world history. Increasingly drawn to the Book of Revelation, which he connected meaningfully not just to the Old Testament prophecies, but to the entirety of the Bible, Joachim found many points of concordance that he organized first around Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in the sky. “[T]here‌ is one wheel, having four faces,” he explained in Enchiridion Super Apocalypsim (1194). “There is one general history to which four special [histories] are joined. The general history is that which proceeds from the beginning of the world straight through to the book of Ezra . . . as well as four special, little histories” linking key Old Testament books. These correspond to the four canonical gospels, which surround the Book of Revelation, which is the ab- solute hub of this wheel, and the history of the Church constitutes the smaller spokes, as it were. In this way Joachim found numerous parallels between events in the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as between key individuals such as Adam, Abraham, the various Hebrew prophets, John the Baptist, and, of course, Jesus Christ.8 Joachim detailed his multilayered exegesis in a series of books that culminate in the Liber Concordiae Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (1200), while his analysis of the prophetic Old Testament books and the Book of Revelation came out at about the same time as Expositio in Apocalypsim. Considering the com- plexity of these many concordances, Joachim further explained them graphi- cally in the Liber Figurarum, issued just after his death in 1202. This incredible work is composed almost entirely of elaborate diagrams and drawings that illustrate Joachim’s division of history into three broad ages, subdivided into epochs and eras. The ages, drawn as interconnected rings, correspond to the Trinity. The Age of the Father spans from Creation through the career of John the Baptist; the Age of the Son spans from the Prophet Isaiah’s career through Christ’s death and resurrection; and the Age of the Holy Spirit spans from Christ’s birth through the events of the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Four major overlapping points correspond to the “tetragrammaton,” 18 A Dream of the Judgment Day being God’s name—Yahweh— as spelled in Hebrew by four letters. The entire structure is framed within the Greek letters alpha and omega, while the exact center of the structure represents Jesus Christ at the peak of his ministry.9 Incredibly, in a significant break from his predecessors, Joachim’s deep study of specific numbers given in the Bible, such as the 1,290 days of Daniel 12:11, the forty-two generations between Abraham and Christ mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, and particularly of the groups of sevens in Revelation, led him to calculate that the end of the world would occur in the year 1280. Joachim’s fame and popularity spread quickly beyond Calabria, with diver- gent groups of “Joachimites” refining his prophecies. His more outrageous pronouncements did not receive official endorsement, and indeed his -at tempt to predict the exact ending of the world was condemned by a succession of thirteenth-century popes who sought to squelch the Joachimite movement, capped by his millenarianism being branded as heretical at the Synod of Arles in 1263. Despite this, and the passing of 1280 without inci- dent, Joachim’s fame grew still stronger in the late Middle Ages, spawning various Joachimite sects that the Church struggled to suppress. A steady stream of official documents denounced self-proclaimed prophets, especially those claiming to know when the End would come, as heretics. The

Figure 1.1. Joachim of Fiore, Trinitarian Circles enclosing the Tetragrammaton (from the Liber Figurarum [1202]). Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS. 255A, f.7v. The Woman in the Wilderness 19 faithful were reminded of Christ’s admonition in Matthew 24:36 that only the Father knows the day and the hour of the End. Nevertheless, not only did millennialism and apocalypticism become more popular in the centuries after Hildegard’s and Joachim’s careers, but the temptation to match current events to the seemingly inscrutable predictions of the Bible, as well as to divine the identity of the dreaded Antichrist, proved irresistible.10

The Apocalyptic Reformation

The foundation laid by the Bible’s prophetic texts, particularly the Book of Revelation, as well as a tradition of eschatological speculation and exegeses through the in-depth study of those texts over the ensuing millennium, gave rise to a culture of apocalypticism that fundamentally defined European Christianity. Interpretations of Revelation had come to agree that the Millennium began with Christianity’s legitimation in the early fourth century and lasted until the beginning of the fourteenth century, in keeping with an Augustinian proscription against eschatological forecasting. However, the attractions of matching biblical prophecies to specific current and historical events, as well as an obsession with identifying the dreaded Antichrist, proved all too powerful, and new developments rekindled exegetical analyses that repositioned the Millennium in the future, rather than in the past. In few places did this apocalyptic, millenarian Christianity express itself more fervently than in the radical sectarian movements of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, and its particular expression in both Old England and the New England established in North America. In light of the Church’s increasing wealth and political power, as well as its heavy-handed efforts to suppress all criticism, Martin Luther (1483–1546) gradually reached the dreadful conclusion that the Church had effectively shifted its allegiance from Christ to Satan. He repeatedly made this point in his polemical works, most explicitly in Adversus execrabilis Antichristi bullam (1520) and Table Talk (1566), in the latter of which he called Pope Leo X “the right Antichrist.” However, Luther did not agree with the canonicity of the Book of Revelation and deplored both laymen’s and theologians’ attempts to predict the timing of the End based on its obscure and highly metaphor- ical language. While he dismissed Revelation as “neither apostolic nor prophetic,” Luther nonetheless included it as an appendix to his 1534 translation of the Bible into German. Significantly, he endorsed the illustration 20 A Dream of the Judgment Day of the Book of Revelation with woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer, in which the pope bows before the seven-headed beast. Just as Hildegard of Bingen had predicted that the Antichrist would be born of the Church, so Luther grew in his belief that the Antichrist will be a pope, and he increasingly attacked the Papacy as an anti-Christian institution. This aspect of Luther’s thought, which he would have denied as being central to his theology, nevertheless infused Lutheranism with apocalyptic militancy and fueled Protestantism’s spread throughout Europe. Catholics, for their part, saw the Antichrist in Luther, and the Church’s Counter-Reformation thus had an element of apocalypticism that legitimized a toxic zealotry on both sides.11 Radical popular millenarianism and apocalypticism intermittently flared up throughout central and western Europe in the century or so preceding Luther’s Reformation, as evidenced in the Lollard and Hussite movements, but his negation of papal and higher clerical authority as unscriptural trans- lated in some people’s minds into a nullification also of higher political authority, inspiring an attempt at revolution to eradicate not just the super- structure of the Catholic Church, but to destroy the social order. The result was a peasant revolt in Germany that erupted in 1524 under the spiritual leadership of Thomas Müntzer, a radical apocalypticist and Anabaptist who had steeped himself in Luther’s writings, finding particular inspiration in the equation of the Church with the Antichrist. Although the revolt had begun purely as a political movement, Müntzer added a religious dimension that infused the rebels with millenarian zeal. As motley bands of armed peasants successfully defeated the forces mobilized by a divided, timorous German nobility, Luther drafted a message of encouragement to the princes, against the thievish, murderous gangs of peasants, encouraging them to put the revolt down. When he wrote of the advent of the millennial kingdom, he only meant the downfall of the Catholic Church, not the destruction of the socio- political order, and quickly enough the princes organized a substantial coalition army to meet a similarly massed peasant army at Frankenhausen in May 1525.12 The peasants, most of whom were armed with farm implements and swords, faced what surely many of them must have perceived as their doom when they saw the artillery emplacements on the higher ground around them and the cavalry units on their flanks. Müntzer rallied the peasants with assurances that this was Armageddon, the battle that would bring Christ down from the sky, flaming sword in hand to lead the army of God to glorious victory. “I shall catch their cannonballs in my shirtsleeves, and hurl Figure 1.2. Albrecht Dürer, The Revelation of St. John:12. The Sea Monster and the Beast with the Lamb’s Horn [1497–98]. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. 22 A Dream of the Judgment Day them back at them,” he shouted to their raucous cheers. As the moment for the beginning of the battle approached, a darkly overcast sky began to break, bright shafts of sunlight streaking down to the ground as a brilliant rainbow arced over the plain. This, the peasants must have believed, was a sign from God that He smiled upon their endeavor, and that they would be victorious. They advanced on the princes’ army, singing hymns as cannon fire rained down devastatingly upon them, and subsequent cavalry charges sliced into scattered, panicking bands that dropped their weapons and fled the field. Two-thirds of the peasant army lay dead or fatally bleeding on the field, while the rest sought whatever safety they could find, including Müntzer, who was apprehended in the town, hiding in a cellar. Tortured into making a full confession that he was a heretic and a leader of the rebellion, he was paraded through the princes’ army camp before summary execution two weeks later. Despite this embarrassment, millennialism and apocalypticism seemed only to grow in strength as the Reformation swept throughout northern, central, and western Europe.13 Despite this significant defeat, Anabaptist apocalypticism in Germany only strengthened over the next decade, concentrating in the city of Münster, where the sectarians came under the leadership of Melchior Hoffmann (c. 1495–1543), Bernhard Rothmann (c. 1495–1535), and Jan van Leiden (1509–1536), who interpreted the Frankenhausen disaster as the prepara- tory harbinger of Armageddon rather than the climactic engagement itself. The Münsterite Anabaptists are noteworthy for their radicalism, especially with regard to visionary mysticism and sexual egalitarianism. The women of this movement were particularly notorious for their fervency, reputedly shouting prophecies in the streets, and sometimes falling to the ground in ecstatic convulsions during which they claimed to see angels and demons in their midst. When the city threatened to expel them as a public nuisance, they initiated an armed uprising, taking over the town hall and market square in a prelude to the complete assumption of control over the city, which Jan van Leiden declared would be the New Jerusalem predicted in the Book of Revelation. Rothmann justified Münsterite millennialism on the basis of elaborate exegeses, much of it involving dense numerological analysis. The arrival of Jan Matthys (c. 1500–1534) from the Netherlands in early February 1534 marked a turning point in the Münsterite movement, as he quickly eclipsed Hoffmann and van Leiden as a spiritual leader, prophet, and dic- tator who ordered a purge of the city’s non-Anabaptist “nonbelievers.” Soon the city was surrounded and besieged by an army gathered by the Bishop of The Woman in the Wilderness 23

Münster, who had fled immediately after the coup. Matthys imposed an -ab solute egalitarian communalism, warning that the forces of the Antichrist were preparing to invade the city in what would unfold as the Battle of Armageddon. Inspired by a vision, he and a few of his disciples attempted to ride out to break the siege, but were promptly killed. Jan van Leiden assumed Matthys’s mantle, outperforming his mentor as a visionary and prophet as the siege army grew in strength and, with the aid of a handful of deserters, stormed the city in June 1535 and destroyed the “New Jerusalem.” The whole of the Münsterite leadership died in the battle, but radical Anabaptism survived, as did Rothmann’s interpretive schema.14 This bloody example of militant apocalypticism served as an object lesson to other Protestants, who gradually tempered their messages, distanced themselves from Anabaptist violence, and reasserted the established interpretation of the Millennium as an event in the past and not one to anticipate in the future. But the idea of an imminent fulfillment of John of Patmos’s prophecies was impossible to dispel, and maintained its power to inspire. English Protestants were drawn to the florid rhetoric of John Bale (1495– 1563), whose deep analysis of the Book of Revelation, The Image of Bothe Churches (1547), depicted the cosmic battle between good and evil as a war between the (Protestant) church of Christ and the (Catholic) church of the Antichrist; one that is evident in the progression of historical events, and in which each true Christian is a kind of holy warrior. When King Henry VIII of England broke with the Roman Church in the mid-1530s, he did so for purely political and dynastic reasons rather than out of any religious conviction, and so the Church of England that derived from Henry’s reforms failed to satisfy his Protestant subjects. The struggle between Catholics and Protestants that consumed his reign and lasted through that of his young, sickly son Edward VI reached a critical mass with the ascension of his de- voutly Catholic daughter Mary in 1555, who committed herself to the erad- ication of all heresies as she set about restoring England’s subordination to Rome. She is most infamous, however, for her violent campaign to persecute Protestants that John Foxe memorialized in his Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (1563), also known as the Book of Martyrs, which followed Bale in depicting the Marian period as a crucial precedent to—if not the actual fulfillment of—the prophecy in Revelation 11 concerning the public slaughter of two “witnesses.”15 Factions of radical Protestants emerged throughout England and Scotland that grew still more radical as a consequence of Mary’s brutal 24 A Dream of the Judgment Day repression. Some “Marian Exiles” found their way to Geneva and into the orbit of John Calvin (1509–1564), who claimed to have refined Christianity to its essence in his two-volume work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536, 1559), which inspired a new English translation of the Old and New Testaments as the Geneva Bible (1560). Calvinism, while never explicitly millenarian or apocalyptic, nevertheless echoed Luther in equating the Papacy with the Antichrist, and the hated Mary thus became not just a bête noir, but an agent of Satan. When Mary died, succeeded by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth in 1558, English Calvinists rejoiced and the exiles returned to England in expectation of purifying the Church of England of all “Romish superstitions.” Bale’s apocalypticism deeply informed their theology, and Foxe lauded the “Elizabethan settlement,” comparing Queen Elizabeth I favorably to the Emperor Constantine in the first edition of the Actes and Monuments. The returning expatriate Calvinists hoped she would be their partner and patron.16 They were soon disappointed. Elizabeth rejected Calvinist theology, which outraged the growing faction within the Church of England who came to be called “Puritans” by their critics. One such faction of extreme Calvinists led by Robert Browne (c. 1555–1633), outraged by the Elizabethan settlement, concluded that the Church of England’s failure to divest itself of what remained of Roman Catholic liturgical forms and accoutrements would bring a mini-apocalypse against the island nation, and resolved to break away from the Church of England altogether. Dubbed “Separatists” or “Brownists,” they established independent Congregational churches in England, while others fled to the Continent, eventually settling in religiously pluralistic and liberal Holland in the 1580s and 1590s. The majority of Puritans, however, built their own independent churches and worked toward forcing the transforma- tion they wanted. Puritan writers and theologians pressed the theme of anti- Christian Catholicism relentlessly in making their case that the Church of England must take its final steps toward full reformation, the best representative examples being Thomas Becon’sThe Acts of Christ and Antichrist (1563), Bartholomew Traheron’s An Exposition of the 4 Chapter of . . . Revelation (1573), as well as William Fulke’s Praelections upon the Sacred and Holy Revelation of St. John (1573) and De Successione Ecclesiastica et Latente ab Antichristi Tyrannide Ecclesia (1584).17 Apocalyptic thinking enjoyed robust popularity in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain. King James VI of Scotland, prior to his succeeding Elizabeth to the English throne as James I in 1603, composed A Fruitfull The Woman in the Wilderness 25

Meditation . . . of the vii–x verses of the Second Chapter of the Revelation (1588), which repeats the by then firmly established Protestant belief that the dreaded Antichrist would manifest himself in papal robes, repeating this charge in all of his published writings on religion. Imagery and tropes from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation especially became ubiquitous in popular literature, from the character of Duessa in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) to many references in the plays of William Shakespeare. Several others, most of them bishops, likewise penned screeds against Rome and the Papacy, repeating charges that the Antichrist masqueraded as the supreme pontiff. This became further cemented in the Puritan mind with the outbreak of a cataclysmic religious war in Central Europe in 1618 that raged for thirty years, and which many believed would culminate in the Battle of Armageddon. The “Protestant Union” fighting the Holy Roman Empire accepted the aid of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and this the Puritans saw as a fatal error, believing that the Turkish “infidels” secretly allied with Rome and the “Catholic League” to destroy true Christianity. Many Puritan exegeses on Revelation published during the Thirty Years’ War saw in the Ottomans the armies from the East that would sweep westward in John of Patmos’s vision, and this apparent apostasy confirmed them in their rectitude.18 More than most of their Protestant countrymen, English Puritans connected history and current events to biblical prophecies, earning for themselves a reputation as virtuosos at the interpretation of various signs, omens, and portents. Two Elizabethan works particularly influenced this mentality: Stephen Batman’s The Doome warning all men to Judgmente: Wherein are contayned for the most parte all the straunge Prodigies hapned in the Worlde (1581) and Thomas Beard’sThe Theatre of God’s Judgements . . . (1597). While relatively mundane occurrences could carry some spiritually edifying message or some inkling of something greater to follow, extraordinary phenomena tended to occupy the Puritan mind: violent storms, earthquakes, wildfires, comets, monstrous births, and unusual deaths. King James I at his accession favored the maintenance of episcopacy as the Church of England’s organizing principle, which did not sit well with the Puritans, who had peti- tioned him in vain to abolish such “outward badges of Popish errours” as the wearing of surplices and caps by the clergy, plural church office-holding, and minor practices held over from Catholicism. His decision not to persecute Catholics vigorously, even after the Gunpowder Plot (1605), coupled with his pledge to “harry [Puritans] out of the land, or else do worse,” further 26 A Dream of the Judgment Day alienated the Dissenters, who began to suffer repression under James’s policy of forced conformity.19 There grew an entrenched and unshakable belief in the English Puritan mind that the Stuart dynasty was crypto-Catholic, particularly during the reign of Charles I (r. 1625–1649), whose intolerance for Dissenters, and the Puritans in particular, capped by his preference for “high” Anglicanism and weak support for the Protestant Union in the Thirty Years’ War, convinced them that he was a secretly Catholic minion of Satan. This conclusion Puritans shared now with the Baptists, whose founder, John Smyth, repeatedly declared in The Character of the Beast (1609) that all Anglican churches were anti-Christian. Other Baptist writers added to a growing library of Dissenter polemical apocalypticism, which—along with repeating the pope/Antichrist equation—denounced “[s]‌o many lord bishops [as] so many Antichrists.”20 Polemical counterattacks from Anglican clergymen charged the Dissenters with being the tools of Satan and dismissed their apocalypticism as a brand of delusion harbored by deranged zealots akin to the Münsterite fanatics. Yet the abundant references to biblical prophecies, especially to the Book of Revelation, betray apocalypticism’s and millennialism’s wide- spread appeal. Some more radical Puritan millenarians returned to the Book of Daniel to conclude that the Catholic Church had assumed the Roman Empire’s mantle and thus had yet to fall, and that the millennial dawn had yet to break. Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) and Joseph Mede (1586–1639) were the most influential among these more radical Puritan theologians, arguing in their works on Daniel and Revelation that—while carefully avoiding the folly of date-setting— the darkness of Catholic and Stuart persecution of the true church presaged the thousand-year Chiliad. Mede was confident, however, that the Millennium was not more than a quarter century away from the time he published Clavis Apocalyptica in 1627. Brightman deftly rehabilitated millennialism by dissociating it from wild-eyed Anabaptist fanaticism in the carefully written A Revelation of the Revelation (1611) and A Most Comfortable Exposition of the Prophecie of Daniel (1614), while Mede improved upon Brightman’s themes. Another great influence upon Puritan eschatology was Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), who likewise argued that the latter day was at hand. However, in contradiction to centuries of interpretation that understood the Millennium to precede the Second Coming, Alsted insisted that the Millennium could not come but through Christ’s personal assumption of The Woman in the Wilderness 27 earthly power. In this respect he is the first prominent premillennialist, one whose influence threads throughout radical Protestant theology until it reached its greatest exponents in the nineteenth century.21 A major component of this line of millenarian thought involved the ultimate conversion of the Jews to Christianity soon after the construction of the third temple, when Israel would be a resurrected nation. A linchpin of Christian apocalyptic interpretation, its roots lay in Ezekiel’s incredible vision of the “valley of dry bones” that reassemble themselves into living people (Ezek. 37), “an exceeding great army” symbolizing the rebirth of Israel as the future seat of the millennial kingdom. Only then could the Messiah return, and old Jerusalem would be transformed into the New Jerusalem. Eschewing any notion that the true Christian must wait pa- tiently for the Second Coming, Brightman, Mede, and their followers argued that Christians must think of themselves as spiritual soldiers against the Antichrist, and—more importantly—that the End is near. As John Tillinghast put it forcefully in his connection of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation to his present day, written at the apex of the Cromwellian Protectorate, Christians must not “sit still and do nothing,” but must strive tirelessly “to the effecting these glorious things.” He, like his immediate Puritan forebears and contemporaries, believed that the miraculous conversion of the Jews was about to happen, and the Second Coming soon afterward. Not surprisingly, this attracted the growing concern of both church and state in England, and the mounting intensity of repression under Charles I motivated the Separatist exodus to the New World in 1620, and the mainstream Puritan decision to follow suit ten years later. These migrants understood themselves not to be the inheritors of a distinction that God stripped from the Jews, but rather as a culmination of an election that the Jews would, at the latter day, reclaim and share with them as pure Christians.22

“Your Daughters Shall Prophesy” from the City on a Hill

The Puritans crowded aboard the Arbella knew that theirs was a holy mission. Their leader, John Winthrop, assured them “that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us,” and there was no doubt in his mind that the city he referred to was the New Jerusalem. An earlier English colo- nizing venture by the Dorchester Company under the leadership of Roger 28 A Dream of the Judgment Day

Conant arrived on the New England coast in 1626, where he and a contin- gent of colonists built a settlement on the ruins of an abandoned Pawtucket village called Naumkeag. This endeavor floundered, and the site was taken over by the New England Company in 1628, which sent John Endecott to replace Conant as governor. Invigorated by an influx of fresh colonists and a renewed sense of purpose, Naumkeag was renamed Salem, not just as an expression of hope for peace (shalom), but also as a signal that it would be the kind of godly “Bible community” that would prefigure millennial bliss. “[W]‌ee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us,” Winthrop predicted, “when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England.”23 The Massachusetts Bay Puritans were preceded by Separatist Independents who established the Plymouth Colony a decade earlier, but whereas the former were more overtly inspired by their eschatological convictions, the latter were motivated solely by a belief that the wrath of an outraged God would soon sink the British Isles into a boiling ocean. James I’s and Charles I’s governments made life difficult for the Separatists to such a degree that, facing mounting pressure to conform to the Church of England’s “Romish” practices or face prosecution, many of them felt forced to migrate to Holland and make an ultimately aborted attempt to live there. The religious liberalism that made it possible for them to thrive in unmolested safety soon threatened their religious and ethnic identities, as English children born in Holland grew up bilingual and were exposed to a dangerous array of theological ideas. A return to England was out of the question, hence the remove to the howling American wilderness. “[O]‌ur dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding is but a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere,” wrote Robert Cushman, one of the “Pilgrims” who boarded the Mayflower bound for the New World.24 Both groups, however, shared a certainty that they were God’s chosen people, and had an attachment to the Old Testament’s descriptions of the theocratic kingdoms of Judah and Israel, thus structuring their colonial societies as closely to that model as possible. In this respect, the desire for the free exercise of their conception of the Christian religion was less of a motivation for the Puritans to build a new England than was militant millennialism. Puritan theologians such as William Perkins who witnessed the beginnings of the Great Migration from the sidelines, as well as those who made the journey such as John Cotton (1585–1652), repeatedly emphasized this exact point in their sermons and published treatises. Interestingly, only The Woman in the Wilderness 29 three of Cotton’s published works have survived, all of which are detailed expositions on the Book of Revelation and its intricate relationship to the Old Testament prophecies. Each establishes that the New England Puritans were building the future millennial kingdom and that history would culminate in that endeavor. Although he demurred at the notion of being a prophet himself, he succumbed to the lure of prophesying nonetheless when he declared in early 1640 that “about the time 1655[,]‌ there will be then such a blow given to this beast [the Catholic Church] . . . as that we shall see a further gradual accomplishment and fulfilling of this Prophecy here” in Massachusetts. In another published sermon he exulted that the “errand into the wilderness” would effect the long-delayed completion of the English Reformation as well as the union of splintered Protestantism. “[T]hose that were branded before for Huguenots, and Lollards, and Hereticks,” he hoped, “shall be thought the only men to be fit to have Crownes upon their heads and independent Government committed to them . . . for a thousand years together.”25 Women in early Puritan communities held an unusual prominence. Expected to be conversant in Calvinist theology and encouraged to read the Bible in order to confront Anglican deficiencies, they were also subjects of wary suspicion as the physically and spiritually weaker sex who required close male oversight. Puritans placed women—as wives—at a near equal status with husbands and fathers for the better government of families, though they were expected to submit to fathers and husbands. Rather than a necessary evil, as the Catholic Church tended to consider women, to the Puritan mind women under male control are a necessary good. Their radical Calvinism inclined them to public outspokenness, and Puritan men were aware that anyone may go too far, even without being a Puritan. In 1625 an English no- blewoman, Eleanor Davis, claimed to have heard the voice of God thundering to her that “[t]‌here is nineteen years and a half to the Judgment Day,” and for this and predicting Charles I’s dethronement was consigned to prison. Jane Hawkins in 1629 began issuing dire predictions of the downfall of the Church of England, as well as other prophecies, from her bed in peculiar extempora- neous rhyming discourse that drew curious crowds before she, too, landed in prison. Nevertheless, as Marilyn J. Westerkamp notes, “Puritan women arrived in New England with an assurance of their own importance to their religious community. They had served as patrons, publishers, and popularizers; they had died for the faith in the sixteenth century and opened their homes to private prayer meetings in the seventeenth.” This led to a number of cases of 30 A Dream of the Judgment Day outspoken women whom Massachusetts struggled to control in its first years, the most important of whom was Anne Hutchinson.26 Hutchinson was an early immigrant to Massachusetts, along with her hus- band and children, and brought with her a reputation as a self-proclaimed prophetess. An acquaintance, William Bartholomew, recalled that when they met in London, she claimed “that she never had any great thing done about her but it was revealed to her beforehand.” She was an ardent devotee of fellow immigrant John Cotton, and soon after her arrival in 1634 cultivated a good standing through her talents as a midwife and lay physician, as well as her keen religious literacy. By 1636 she concluded that Cotton and Rev. John Wheelwright were the only divines in the Bay Colony who preached the true Covenant of Grace, the rest of the clergy heretically preaching the Arminian Covenant of Works. At weekly meetings in her home she expounded upon Puritan Calvinist theology, as well as giving her opinion about the prevalence of Arminianism among the colony’s clergy, to growing crowds of men and women who progressively regarded her as practically a minister in her own right. Warned to keep silent in her denunciations of the clergy, she ampli- fied her criticism while denying that she pretended to perform in any minis- terial role. Nevertheless, as she testified, “it was presently reported . . . [that] I was proud and did despise all ordinances.” Her activities coincided with the advent of a small Antinomian faction in Boston that publicly questioned the clergy’s orthodoxy and the government’s support of them. Although the Antinomians certainly took inspiration from Hutchinson, she never partici- pated in their confrontations in the churches and streets of the town.27 This did not sit well with the religious and secular leadership of the colony. Her unabashed flouting of gender norms, particularly her assertions of greater theological expertise, led to her being accused of sedition and heresy in late 1637. Earlier that year, Wheelwright, indirectly lending Anne his support, referenced the brewing Hutchinsonian controversy as part of the conflict between Christ and Antichrist, asserting that the few true saints in Massachusetts were surrounded by “hypocrites” who had placed “a false Christ . . . in true Christs roome.” But the apostates’ time was going to come, he predicted, and the saints will have “power over the Nations, and they shall breake them in peeces as shivered with a rod of yron. . . .” Accused of anti- nomianism in 1637–1638, Anne skillfully deflected the charges against her, just as she had during her previous examination. As the transcripts of her preliminary examination and the later church trial show, she “ran exegetical The Woman in the Wilderness 31 circles around her opponents,” according to Westerkamp. However, during her examination she predicted that she would be vindicated, cautioning her judges that “if you go on in this course . . . you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity,” further proclaiming, “I doe verily believe that he will deliver me out of [y]our‌ hands.” Asked how she could be so sure of such an outcome, she replied almost nonchalantly that she knew this through an “immediate” revelation from God, justifying herself by referencing some verses from the Book of Joel:

And it shall come to pass afterward, That I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your old men shall dream dreams, Your young men shall see visions.

Protestant theology denies the occurrence of miracles after the apostolic age, including direct communication between God and an individual, and Puritans emphasized that God speaks to people through various “signs” and “wonders” best interpreted by ministers. The clergymen and magistrates judged her guilty of heresy and sentenced her to excommunication and ban- ishment from the colony. She and her family, along with a significant number of her followers, departed for the newly established colony of Providence on Narragansett Bay.28 Anne Hutchinson was an unusually extreme example of a phenomenon that early Puritanism had encouraged, but which became a liability in the holy commonwealth. As Mary Beth Norton notes, outspoken women of low social rank or poor reputation were never tolerated and were se- verely punished, but Hutchinson’s respectability and status among Boston’s women forced the male leadership to take her seriously. Her theology was airtight, as the clergy had to admit, but the number of male followers she attracted—some of them also of high rank—meant that the magistrates had to proceed cautiously. When she revealed her belief that she received direct revelations from God, her fate was sealed. Her intellectual prowess and challenging of traditional gender roles have long been the focus of scholarly analysis of the Hutchinsonian controversy, more than her prophetic apocalypticism. Anne’s notoriety did not begin with her confrontation with Massachusetts secular and religious authorities, but preceded her decision 32 A Dream of the Judgment Day to emigrate in 1634, though the evidence for her prior reputation for prophesying came from testimony given at her examination and trial. However, it was her thinking about the potential identity of the Antichrist that pushed Hutchinson from a religious outlier to a seditious threat. Before her tran- sition to Puritanism, she subscribed to the common assumption that there would be a papal or a Muslim Antichrist, but as a Puritan believed that the Church of England’s ministers constituted a phalanx of antichrists. Upon arriving in Massachusetts and spending a few years there, she concluded that all but two members of its ministry had drifted into Arminian apostasy and had joined Satan’s ranks. However, the court turned her charges against the established ministry around to accuse her of being the wolf in sheep’s clothing. John Winthrop stated emphatically in his summary of the episode that Anne was a “great imposter, an instrument of Satan so fitted and trained to his service for interrupting passage, [of his] kingdome in this part of the world, and poysoning the Churches here planted. . . .” His suspicions were later confirmed when subsequent events further implicated her and vindicated the wisdom of the court’s decision to banish her.29 John Cotton sought to seal the fissures created by the Antinomian crisis in a series of lectures explicating the Book of Revelation. He reminded his audiences that they must be ever grateful to God for their deliverance from the “great beast” of Roman Catholicism, but that they remained engaged in a war between Christ and Satan, and that they, the true saints, had fled to the American wilderness where the pure Church would ultimately triumph over the Antichrist. Meanwhile, back in England, mounting tensions between King Charles I and Parliament led to the convening of the “Long Parliament” of 1640, kindling hopes in Puritan hearts that a revolution might fulfil the prophecy in Daniel 2:44 that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed.” An anonymously authored treatise came out the following year, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, that celebrated the expected deposi- tion of the king with numerous references to Daniel and Revelation. Written most likely by Thomas Goodwin,Sion’s Glory was part of a flurry of apocalyptic and millenarian tracts stoking the flames of religious zeal during the English Civil War (1642–1649).30 New England’s Puritans rejoiced at the imminent downfall of the secretly Papist Stuart monarchy and the erection of what they assured themselves was the long-awaited Fifth Monarchy. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) the re- nowned poet, celebrated by penning an epic “Dialogue between Old England and New” (1642). Once the New Model Army finally vanquished the royalist The Woman in the Wilderness 33 forces and toppled the Papacy, she predicted that England would then set out to destroy the Muslim Turks,

And do to Gog as thou hast done to Rome. Oh Abraham’s seed, lift up your heads on high, For sure the day of your redemption’s nigh; The scales shall fall from your long blinded eyes, And Him you shall adore who now despise. Then fullness of the nations in shall flow, And Jew and Gentile to one worship go. . . .

While Bradstreet envisioned a union of Old and New England as the seat of the millennial kingdom, Edward Johnson (1598–1672), a militia officer and veteran of the Pequot War (1637), held to the more exclusivist idea that New England was religiously purer. In his history The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England (1650), Johnson thought of himself as countable among “the forerunners of Christ[‘]s Army,” armed with “Swords, Rapiers, and all other piercing weapons” to face down the Antichrist. “[C]‌ome out of the holes of the secret places,” he rallied his readers, “feare not because your number is but small, gather into Churches, and let Christ be your King.” Indeed, the Civil War elicited many eschatologically inspired works thumping out of Boston’s and London’s presses, all of which imagined the vindication of Old England, the sacking of Rome, and the dissolution of the Turks. A minor exodus of New Englanders to Old England ensued, but these American Puritans quickly soured on their English counterparts’ religious moderation and preservation of Stuart toleration policies, and the Massachusetts Puritans finally abandoned any hopes that the English Reformation would come to fruition.31

“God’s Controversy with New-England”

Mary Rowlandson had been on the move for over a week, struggling to keep up the hectic pace her Indian captors set after the raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts, in February 1676, during which she and her three children, along with nineteen of her neighbors, were taken and many others killed. The war party that raided Lancaster was part of a coalition of Indian tribes under the leadership of the Pokanoket Wampanoag sachem Metacom, who 34 A Dream of the Judgment Day hoped to launch a general Indian war for the expulsion of the English from their lands. Rowlandson’s youngest child, Sarah, had perished in her arms as the war party made its way northward, and she had been separated from her two surviving children. Pressured to adapt to Indian lifeways in order to survive her ordeal, she watched as a few of her fellow captives gradually abandoned elements of their Anglo-American identity over the course of three months, but she stubbornly held on to her Puritan English selfhood. Once she had been “redeemed” through the payment of a ransom, Mary was encouraged by Increase Mather to commit her doleful experience to paper in the form of a narrative that equated her ordeal to that of New England as a whole. Metacom’s War was a costly victory for the New Englanders, and Puritan ministers delivered scathing “jeremiad” sermons blaming the region’s many afflictions on spiritual inadequacy, worldliness, and pride— sins that Rowlandson identified as leading God to afflict her by way of correc- tion. Mather hoped that Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) would serve as an object lesson in the Lord’s affliction of His chosen people. War, natural disaster, religious upheavals, economic downturns, political uncertainty, and the horrifying specter of witchcraft shook the city on a hill in the last half of the seventeenth century, but in admonishing New England to reconnect with first-generation piety and religious destiny, the clergy also assured their audiences that New England would still be the site of the New Jerusalem.32 The failure of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Stuart Restoration in 1660 confirmed for many New England Puritans that the Church of England had begun to stride toward an inevitable rapprochement, perhaps even a reunion, with the Catholic Church. The religious homogeneity that typi- fied the New England colonies of the founding generation was no longer so prevalent in the 1650s and 1660s—potentially fatal cracks in the millennial city’s foundation—and second-generation ministers revived it by linking it to regional exceptionalism. By the 1650s the majority of Puritan clergymen were native-born New Englanders who had obtained degrees from Harvard College, and they pointed to an influx of Dissenters fleeing England as -ev idence that God favored the Puritan endeavor in America. However, there remained symptoms of spiritual declension and moral decay. The relative tenuousness of the founding era had given way to burgeoning prosperity and rising standards of living, evident to anyone who walked Boston’s streets to see the more refined houses and public buildings, and the finery worn by elite men and women bustling to and fro. Worse still was the fact that church The Woman in the Wilderness 35 attendance and applications for membership had begun to dip, some opting to worship God in Presbyterian, Baptist, or Quaker meetinghouses, others choosing to stay at home on Sundays. The adoption of the Cambridge Platform in 1648 compromised independency for the sake of theological and doctrinal consistency, but it did little more than standardize Congregational ecclesiology.33 Challenged by a diversifying population and flagging church membership that threatened the spiritual strength of the rising generation, the Congregationalist churches organized a synod that devised the “Halfway Covenant” in 1662. The as-yet unconverted adult children of confirmed church members would be given provisional membership, which granted them access to the Eucharist and, more importantly, baptism for their children. It was a controversial decision, not least due to its implication that sal- vation and damnation might run in families—a significant step away from an essential precept of Calvinism—and just under half of New England’s Congregational churches adopted the Halfway Covenant. Advocates for it saw it as a solution to the problem of declension, assuring skeptics that halfway membership would inevitably lead to full membership. Opponents could see it nothing less than heresy at worst, and at best a sign of the same declension that the synod had sought to halt in the first place. Churches that rejected the Halfway Covenant continued to struggle with declining membership, while those that adopted it did experience a turnaround. Newly ordained ministers graduating from Harvard and Yale tended toward more liberal positions on the issue of doctrine and discipline, with more churches practicing open or mixed communion and looser membership requirements. This was something that increasing numbers of laymen had been pressing for, since only freeholders who were church members possessed voting rights and opportunities for office-holding. Conservative clergymen worried that expanding the ranks of freeholders threatened their social and political influence, while those jealous of clerical power welcomed the more demo- cratic reforms.34 Even as the Halfway Covenant sparked debate and anxiety, a classic of Puritan apocalyptic literature flew hot off Samuel Green’s Cambridge press. “The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment,” an epic poem by Rev. Michael Wigglesworth of Malden, Massachusetts, summarized in 224 quatrains the more gripping elements of the Book of Revelation to describe in vivid detail Christ’s reappearing and the rough justice meted out to the unregenerate. He begins with what the contemporaneous 36 A Dream of the Judgment Day jeremiad sermons likewise characterized as a people “[w]allowing‌ in all kind of sin, vile wretches lay secure:/The best of men had scarcely then their Lamps kept in good ure.” Briefly describing a scene of bewildered and frightened people beholding the rending of the sky, which admits “His winged Hosts . . . gathering/Both god and bad, both quick and dead, and all to Judgment bring,” and noting that “[a]t Christ’s right hand the Sheep do Stand,” Wigglesworth devotes the majority of his stanzas to describing an unrelenting scene of horror as the unrighteous and the antichristian, among them “Apostates and Run-awayes,” “Idolaters, false worshippers,” “Sabbath- polluters, Saints persecuters,” “Adulterers and Whoremongers,” “Murd’rers,” “Witches, Inchanters, and Ale-house-haunters” tremble before Christ and beg for their souls, but to no avail:

Ye sinful wights, and cursed sprights, that work Iniquity, Depart together from me for ever to endless Misery; Your portion take in yonder Lake, where Fire and Brimstone flameth: Suffer the smart, which your desert as it’s due wages claimeth.

Forgoing more than a cursory description of Hell apart from allowing the reader to listen in on the agonized, “tormented, and tormenting” cries of the damned, Wigglesworth concludes by following the jubilant Saints into that “glorious Place! where face to face Jehovah may be seen. . . . /Where the Sun shine, and light Divine, of God’s bright Countenance, /Doth rest upon them every one, with sweetest influence.” “The Day of Doom” became an instant bestseller, and heads a list of similar works known as “chapbooks” and “penny godlies,” short, inexpensive publications that dealt in extreme subject matter such as graphic tales of martyrdom and stories about Satan. Like Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God, “The Day of Doom” remained deeply popular well into the eighteenth century.35 Wigglesworth spoke more particularly about the region’s tribulations in another lengthy poem, “God’s Controversy with New-England” (1662), written in the midst of an extraordinary drought, and in which he echoed the many jeremiads raining down from Congregational pulpits from Salem to Stamford. The period from the 1660s through the 1680s was a uniquely The Woman in the Wilderness 37

Figure 1.3. Michael Wigglesworth, “The Day of Doom” (London, 1687 ed.). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

doleful one for New England, marked by climate fluctuations that brought violent storms, unusually hot summers, bone-chillingly cold winters, droughts, and concomitant poor harvests and outright crop failures; natural and acci- dental wildfires, disease outbreaks, earthquakes, and strange astronomical phenomena; wars with Indian neighbors, rising tensions between England and France that threatened chronic war on the frontier; and royal infringe- ment upon Massachusetts Bay’s charter liberties. New Englanders had some cause to believe that they had provoked God’s wrath. Paradoxically, Calvinist 38 A Dream of the Judgment Day

Christians there also saw in these unwelcome divine attentions confirmation of New England’s millenarian exceptionalism.36 The elder ranks of Puritan ministers preaching jeremiad sermons reminded anxious audiences that they all had wandered from the original mission and broke the covenant with God, resulting in the increasing troubles, and the only remedy was collective repentance and renewal of the covenant—a point made relentlessly in printed sermons of the period. An early example of the jeremiad was preached to the Massachusetts General Court by Salem’s John Higginson in 1663, and in it he equated New England to Israel in a sermon replete with millenarian implications that grew into a recurrent theme in subsequent “election sermons.” William Stoughton’s election sermon, New England’s True Interest (1668), stressed that New England has winked at “Whoredoms and Fornications,” “Revellings and Drunkeness,” “Rudeness and Incivility, [and] a degeneracy from the good Manners of the Christian world. . . . [B]‌etter things, O New-England , hath thy God expected of thee.” Satan and his demons prey upon the spiritually vulnerable, he warned, and these God abandons. This nearly undetectable “brood of the Anti-Christ” move among the saints, masquerading expertly as the Elect, and there were more of them now than ever before—a satanic fifth column infiltrating the city on the hill. Ignore them, he warned, and New England’s troubles would mount as God’s anger poured forth upon it. Increase Mather chimed in with an ominous warning that, on account of “the sins of the Countrey,” God’s chosen people would suffer “the Symptoms of divine displeasure,” that would be mere hints of a “judgment [that is] near at hand,” though he nonetheless confirmed New England’s millennial destiny.37 The greatest sign of divine displeasure was undoubtedly the outbreak of a conflict initiated by the Pokanoket Wampanoag sachem Metacom—known to the English as “King Phillip”—in 1675. The Algonquian tribes of New England, much as elsewhere throughout Anglo-America, were increasingly surrounded, pushed, and displaced by a rapidly growing colonial population, which imperiled traditional lifeways, and both tribal and individual identity. Metacom, the son of Massasoit, who had aided the first wave of Plymouth settlers, raged against a string of broken English promises to respecting treaty agreements and territorial limits, and convinced the Narragansetts and Nipmucs to join the Wampanoags in an attempt to destroy Massachusetts and Connecticut entirely. War parties began to strike along the frontier that summer and fighting continued unbroken until 1676, with intermittent flare-ups until the spring of 1678. The war was the bloodiest in American The Woman in the Wilderness 39 colonial history until the Seven Years’ War almost a century later, with devastating losses on both sides, but most significantly among the Indians, both combatants and noncombatants. The Indian coalition’s loss shattered Native power in southern New England, with many surviving Indians being sold into slavery, forced to assimilate as best they could, or compelled to migrate north and west to seek protection from larger, more powerful tribes such as the Iroquois League.38 Although the “New England Confederation” that arose in the summer of 1675 to meet Metacom’s challenge coalesced quickly and mobilized with dispatch, the Indian coalition nonetheless inflicted heavy damage, especially upon frontier villages and towns. Although the Confederation had by far the greater number of troops and supplies, the Indians embarrassed the unified colonial militia in the early battles, prompting Edward Bulkeley to remind his audience at a jeremiad fast-day sermon that God permitted the “humbling and abasing [of] our selves, in the Consideration of our great ne- glect of serious observation of Gods favours towards us.” Mary Rowlandson echoed this point in her captivity narrative when, as the band with which she was traveling successfully forded a river despite numerous encumbrances, and all the while pursued by an English militia unit, caused her to marvel at “the strange providence of God in preserving the heathen.” Once the militia reached the river, however, she watched in outraged disbelief as the colonials withdrew and refused to engage the Indians and thus possibly free her and the remaining captives. “God did not give them courage or activity to go over after us; we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance. . . .”39 As news of these humiliations came into Boston and Plymouth, Puritan ministers called for fast days and scorched the ears of their congregations with denunciations for collective sins. This was, William Hubbard knew, “a day of great rebuke and trouble to the poor people sojourning in this wilderness,” but once the Massachusetts and Connecticut assemblies convened panels to implement moral reformation, Increase Mather noted with re- lieved satisfaction that “[t]he‌ Lord gave success to our forces.” A law against “provoking evils” passed by the General Court in November 1675 targeted the usual “ungodly” behaviors and disrespect for law and order, and it was hoped that this would bring about a turning point in the war. It seemed that it had. As the colonial militia began to rout Metacom’s war parties, eventually destroying the Indian coalition and bringing Metacom to summary execution in a Plymouth swamp, fast-day jeremiads soon gave way to celebratory 40 A Dream of the Judgment Day thanksgiving sermons that harkened back to Winthrop’s “Modell of Christian Charity” and reinforced New England’s identity as an “elect nation.” Histories of the war immediately went to press, all of which follow Increase Mather’s A Brief History of the War with the Indians (1676) and An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New-England (1676) in laying the blame for New England’s travail at a people who abandoned their covenant with God through, among the usual sins of the flesh, “contention,” “pride,” and—most abominably— the “Ill entertainment of the Ministry.” This was no less, however, than what befell Israel when it ran afoul of its covenant with God, he noted. Referencing the Jewish Revolt of 66 ce in his Exhortation, Mather drew a direct parallel to Metacom’s War when he wrote that “Pompey seized upon the Temple, when it was the Jews solemn Fasting-day,” and this was because “[t]he Jews were then exceedingly degenerated,” but “hath it not been so with us in a sad degree?” Mather interpreted the late conflict in apocalyptic terms in the Exhortation, summarizing the profusion of New England’s evils as identical to those that afflicted Israel for which the prophets chastised the Jews and predicted imminent disaster, yet promised ultimate vindication and glory. So also would it be for New England, but only when there was sincere, collective penitence. Underscoring a theme appearing in most New England Puritan sermons, Mather urged people to “[b]elieve in the Lord your God . . . believe his Prophets so shall you prosper.”40 Believing that the fault for New England’s tribulations lay not just at the feet of its people, Mather proclaimed the necessity for a synod for the “reformation of manners” in a 1677 sermon, A Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostacy, which chided Governor John Leverett’s administration for failing to strictly enforce Sabbath laws, and admonished ordinary people for tavern- haunting, harboring evil thoughts, lax parenting, and increasingly loosening morals. The Indian war, he stressed, was an affliction intended by God to prompt pious introspection and a renewed commitment to religious prin- ciples. When Leverett died in 1679, he was replaced by Simon Bradstreet, who agreed with Mather and his colleagues, and so the synod convened that September with Increase Mather hoping that the spiritual focus of the first generation might be restored. He would be disappointed, as the bulk of the clergy and laity were more concerned about the decline of public civility than the relaxation of church discipline and creeping theological liberalism. The Halfway Covenant was reaffirmed, but so also was the importance of church attendance and membership, with the result that ministers began re- porting better and more consistent church attendance, more applications for The Woman in the Wilderness 41 membership, and a governmental initiative to build new meetinghouses. The litigiousness that plagued Massachusetts especially saw a modest decline as well, and so New Englanders entered the 1680s hopeful that God’s favor had been restored.41 New England had only just recovered from the Indian war before terrible news arrived from England that King Charles II had granted a charter to the breakaway colony of New Hampshire in 1679. It seemed that a crypto- Catholic monarch was proceeding with a plot to weaken the last bastion of puritanism. Anxious Bay colonists worried that a sweeping overhaul in colonial administration would follow, and it did when Charles II died in 1685 and was succeeded by his brother James, who consolidated the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire into the “Dominion of New England.” James II vented his pent-up resentment against the regicidal Long Parliament, resurrecting the hoary doctrine of divine right monarchy and attempting to reassert royal absolutism. While Charles II had been sympathetic to Catholics in his court and only rumored to be a secretly practicing Catholic, James II made no secret of his conversion to Catholicism while in French exile and celebrated Mass in the palace at Hampton Court. Whereas he advocated religious toleration, he did not extend such liberality to Puritan Dissenters, whom he wished to see eradicated. There were few changes in the Dominion colonies under provisional governor Joseph Dudley, apart from harsher enforcement of the Navigation Acts and the abrogation of all laws that clashed with English law. However, by December 1686, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey were annexed to the Dominion and Dudley was replaced by the aggressively Anglican Sir Edmund Andros. All of the Dominion’s original colonial charters had been revoked, and Andros set about exercising his prerogatives as the king’s representative by declaring all common lands to be the king’s (i.e., his) property. Anyone who may have doubted Andros’s right to rule with such seeming abandon were frequently reminded of his power by his often parading about Boston leading a regi- ment of English red-coated soldiers permanently stationed there.42 In a move that scandalized the Puritans, Andros saw to it that all Dominion colonies enacted toleration for all Protestant Christians, including Quakers and Baptists, who had been particular targets of Bay Colony exclusionary laws. A more obvious sign of the new regime’s priorities was made manifest when Andros decreed that the Old South Church in Boston be used for Anglican services, against which Dissenting clergymen protested. It was widely believed among New England’s Dissenters that both James II’s and 42 A Dream of the Judgment Day

Governor Andros’s advocacy of the Anglican Church was but a thin dis- guise of their championing of Catholicism, and this seemed all the clearer in the latter’s mishandling of the military situation in Maine. The Wabanaki, while never part of Metacom’s coalition, took advantage of the war and its aftermath to reassert claims to previously unoccupied territory along the coast now lightly settled by New Englanders, conducting devastating raids on the settlements of Falmouth, Saco, Wells, and York that sent scores of terrified refugees streaming southward toward the relative safety of Boston. Diplomatically tied to the French in Canada, the Wabanaki enjoyed tacit French encouragement, and Andros’s measures to fortify the northern frontier and organize joint operations of militia and English army units to defend the settlements seemed to be—for all their great expense—superficial at best, and at worst treasonous for their near utter failure. The more paranoid whis- pered about clandestine plots by Andros to gain the French and Wabanaki as allies in order to eradicate the Dominion’s Dissenters, this being a prelude to the imposition of Catholicism once the feared Anglican rapprochement with Rome became fact. This made Andros an ally of the Antichrist. As John Palmer put it simply in The Present State of New-England, James II and his minion Andros were part of “an horrid Popish Plot . . . in which the Extirpation of the Protestant Religion was designed.”43 Word of the Glorious Revolution in England brought a sudden end to the Dominion in April 1689 when Boston militiamen, fortified by a mob of armed citizens, arrested Andros and most of his council—an event raptur- ously celebrated as a miraculous deliverance throughout New England. Once ad hoc governments assumed control over the former Dominion colonies, Puritan treatises justifying the coup, such as Palmer’s, railed against Andros’s tyrannical repression, the imposition of burdensome taxes upon counties not represented in a proper assembly, as well as his excessive enforcement of the Navigation Acts. But counted as at least equal to these crimes, if not the worst, was his crypto-Catholicism. A “Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent” formally explained the coup, echoed Palmer’s manifesto in representing it and the Glorious Revolution as a necessary revolt against governments enthralled by the “great Scarlet Whore” of Rome, who had guzzled the blood of Protestant saints during Queen Mary’s reign. Massachusetts, the Declaration reminded everyone, had been “a Countrey . . . remarkable for the true Profession and pure Exercise of the Protestant Religion” before James II and Andros tried to destroy it. Although it must be said that the grievances against Andros had The Woman in the Wilderness 43 much more to do with excessive taxation, despotism, and military incompe- tence, the use of apocalyptic religious rhetoric is indicative of the power of the language of Revelation to motivate people at all ranks. The bloodshed on the frontier and Andros’s seemingly incompetent prosecution of the war only fed the flames of rebellion, and this defensive war melted into the Anglo-French colonial war called King William’s War by New Englanders.44 Meanwhile, from the ruined, smoking northern frontier came a steady stream of demoralized militiamen and civilian refugees fleeing Wabanaki war parties, heading southward toward Boston and the nearest substan- tially settled towns. The largest of these was Salem. Divided somewhat in the late 1680s between the seaport of Salem “Town” and the farmlands of Salem “Village” to the immediate northwest, greater Salem in 1690 was a munici- pality at war with itself over Salem Village’s desire to free itself from Salem Town, and within the Village itself warring factions arose between those who stood to gain from the Village’s independence and those whose fortunes were tied to the more prosperous Town. Salem Village, while it had its own meetinghouse, scarcely had the means to support it, resulting in ministers hired and before long resigning either because of salary disputes or running afoul of one faction or the other, and failing in appeals to communal unity. The bitterest dispute involved George Burroughs, whose arrogance and quirky personality alienated him from his parishioners, and exacerbated arguments over prompt payment of salary installments and the terms of his employment contract. Dismissed in 1689, he moved to the Maine frontier to minister to the small population of the Casco Bay region, where he earned a reputation as sympathetic to the Indians. Twice when Wabanaki war parties scourged the settlements, Burroughs escaped unharmed and, when this was added to the fact that his first two wives had died suddenly and under purportedly sus- picious circumstances, it should come as little surprise that when the shadow of witchcraft loomed over Salem in 1692, many who knew him suspected that he was Satan’s minister.45 The apparent discovery of a satanic coven of witches in Salem was the most damning proof that Satan and his minions were directly assailing the city on the hill. Starting with inexplicable fits and torments suffered by the daughter and niece-in- law of Rev. Samuel Parris, neophyte minister of the Salem Village meetinghouse, the contagion of witchcraft and Satanism engulfed much of Essex County and stretched into Boston itself. Hundreds of people were arrested, many of them indicted on the basis of hearsay, cir- cumstantial, and the legally disputed “spectral” evidence that turned every 44 A Dream of the Judgment Day session of the specially convened Court of Oyer and Terminer into a fasci- nating spectacle. The ranks of the supernaturally “afflicted” grew from two to three, and eventually to nineteen, some of whom had been accused of witchcraft and confessed prior to becoming victims. When it became clear that confessing witches who named co-conspirators were spared the noose—at least for the time being—most of the accused confessed and called out the names of people who had been cried out against in court already, as well as of neighbors and even family members. The convicted who steadfastly insisted upon their innocence, or confessed but refused to identify fellow witches, were brought to the gallows and hanged—nineteen in all. Only when a rising chorus of critics complained about the use of spectral evidence or other- wise pointed out the many violations of standard legal procedure in witchcraft cases—and a few of the afflicted dared to suggest that Lady Mary Phips, wife of provisional Governor William Phips, may also be a witch—did Phips shut down the trials, ending what Cotton Mather likened to an “inextricable s t or m .” 46 Robert Calef, a harsh critic of the witch trials, related a strange but re- vealing episode when Sarah Good, convicted of witchcraft, took her turn upon the ladder in July 1692 to hang for her supernatural crimes. She had vociferously insisted upon her innocence and cast doubt upon the afflicted girls’ testimony against her. As was customary, condemned criminals were encouraged to confess to their transgressions and beg God’s forgiveness, and so Rev. Nicholas Noyes, assistant to Salem Town’s minister, John Higginson, implored Good to make her confession. “You are a lyar,” she spat at him. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.” Here she made direct reference to Revelation 16:6, in which the Antichrist’s agents who persecute the godly will be forced to drink from rivers and lakes that have turned into blood. What is noteworthy is that in the final moments of her life she was able to recall that passage and cast her persecutors as Satan’s minions, which speaks to the power of biblical prophecy to linger in the mind, as well as to the clergy’s aware- ness of that power to harness it repeatedly. New England strove to put the turbulence of the past two decades as far behind them as possible, even as Salem’s survivors demanded and eventually received restitution from the Massachusetts General Court. Ironically, Cotton Mather championed their cause, admitting that “there have been errors committed,” and the government must be “always ready to declare unto all the world, that you disapprove those errors . . . of our dark time, some years ago.”47 The Woman in the Wilderness 45

A great many historians have analyzed the Salem debacle, their explanations for the origins and progress of the accusations, and especially the miscarriage of justice, ranging from competition for social, economic, and political power among prominent Salem families; the exercise of institutionalized misogyny; and the suffering of a kind of mass hysteria brought on by the myriad afflictions New England had endured in recent decades, most importantly the Indian wars. A conclusion shared by most works on the episode is that the Salem Witch Hunt represents the rattling last breath of European medievalism in America before the dawning of the Enlightenment. The apocalyptic implications of the episode have not been touched by historians of the period, despite the fact that the religious and political leadership of Massachusetts agreed that the agents of the Antichrist had launched a terrible assault upon the city on the hill.48 At the apex of the trials in 1692, Cotton Mather published a sermon by Samuel Lee of New Bristol, Rhode Island, The Great Day of Judgment (1687), in the preface for which he commented upon the revelation of a massive contagion of witchcraft and godlessness in the colony. “I am verily persuaded,” Mather wrote, “the judge is at the door; I do without any hesitation venture to say, the great day of the Lord is near; it is near and it hastens greatly.” Samuel Sewall, one of the judges who later apologized for his role in the travesty, took comfort when in August 1728 he saw “a noble rainbow . . . after great thundering and darkness and rain. . . . I hope this is a sure token that Christ remembers his covenant for his beloved Jews under their captivity and dispersion, and that he will make haste to prepare for them a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”49

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These are the historical and theological foundations upon which Christian millennialism and apocalypticism stand, particularly as they took root in the “New World” by radical Puritans when they founded their “holy commonwealth.” As Christianity moved from being a fringe Jewish movement into a coherent offshoot of Judaism that gradually separated itself from its parent religion, eventually to become the dominant religion in Europe, so Christian eschatology underwent substantial theological revision. While the early Church fathers sought to dampen chiliastic yearning when Christianity became the official religion of the late Roman Empire, the collapse of Roman government in western Europe after 450 kept open a door to eschatological 46 A Dream of the Judgment Day radicalism that found expression in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Here certain concepts and tropes developed by European apocalypticists hardened, becoming fixed ideas that shaped American eschatological thinking. The radicalism of Anglo-American Puritanism avoided the bloodthirst- iness of the Anabaptist zealots of Münster and the antecedent Peasant War, but both movements shared a fervency of apocalyptic and millenarian antic- ipation that essentially defined foundational Calvinism in general, as well as Puritan theology and New England religious culture in particular. The notion of religious and cultural exceptionalism that New England’s Puritans believed set them uniquely apart as God’s chosen people, while not a conviction shared by other Anglo-Americans living in the British colonies, nevertheless came to shape the mentality of Protestant Christianity in British America with the advent and progress of the First Great Awakening.