g errard Winstanley, ‘ a place ... a nd this we count is our dutie, to endeavour to the uttermost, every man in his © Copyrighted Material r From Radical Reformation to English Revolution eformation to preserve the peoples liberties, one as well as another’ Chapter 4 t here are six complementary approaches that are essential for enriching our meaning of the short-lived a g errard Winstanley, riel recovery and reconstruction of the available evidence emphasises the importance h r g essayon errard Winstanley, adical thought. complete picture. relations within the parishes of Walton and Cobham, economic pressures, the A Declaration from the Poor oppressed People shattering impact of Civil War tand widespread rural unrest. r he lives of his fellow eformer The Law of Freedom in a platform Caricchio, d was completed1 before the publication of the magisterial new edition of igger plantations at of Gerrard Winstanley they did not always provide sources for their biblical allusions. a second concentrates on local contexts and the www.ashgate.com www.ashgdate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com w * ww.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com 1 avid d of England f iggers and associates have been similarly explored innegan and s t , edited by g eorge’s l orenza t h homas Corns, ill in Walton-on- g ianfrancesco. © Copyrighted Material a nn r eaders should be aware that it h d ughes and a iggers’ social third places the i The Complete Works have therefore supplied d avid l oewenstein 88 d iggers within their wider milieu by examining what their writings and reported yet also differed from other political and religious movements and communities approach invites a rigorous comparison between Varieties of 17th- and Early 18th-Century English Radicalism – notably biblical, millenarian, hermetic, mystic, utopian, philosophical, legal and medical texts – together with a convincing explanation for how potent ideas and distinctive, sometimes proscribed, scriptural interpretations were transmitted © Copyrighted Material over time and across various geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries. typography. activists and commentators responding to the challenges of addressing perceived class-based inequalities, widening participation in the democratic process, the ‘transition from an agrarian to an industrial society’ in parts of the well as environmental damage to our planet caused by human activity. f inally, there has been a tendency to stress both the history of radicalism’, but also partly considers whether it is still appropriate to posit a single continuous – stretching from the peasants’ rising of 1381 through to the Chartists. for there is some agreement that what largely distinguished the from baronial revolts, religious wars, rebellions and indeed what has been termed d Portugal, iggers and revolutionary island unto itself. ‘ n r 1 l adicalism and the aples and elsewhere was radicalism. 2 e evellers, Particular g nglish Commonwealth2 1649–1660’, d 1980s’,. Burgess, ‘ e e ngland (that supposed ‘ nglish radical tradition – or even multifaceted traditions www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www avis, ‘ .ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashga te.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com 3 3 a HJ William r ccordingly – and with some measure of success – scholars o adicalism in a traditional society: the evaluation of radical thought in the n e r nglish revolution’, pp. 63–9. evisionism: an analysis of early e rbury, d iggers’ continued The Mad Mans Plea Island of great Bedlam 2 t History of Political Thought hird World, as t e he © Copyrighted Material ven so, as is usually recognised, e nglish s 1 tuart historiography in the 1970s and t his is vital r evolution have attempted to assess how and in what ways the changing political, religious, social, economic, cultural and intellectual landscapes of early modern continental studies tracing the roots of which, through a process of recovery, dissemination, reinterpretation and accretion, of the period, namely the Gerrard Winstanley, Radical Reformer r adical late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century students of theosophy, literature and Protestant nonconformityf began debating whether mainstream and, on its fragmentation,ollowing the in multitude the footsteps of sects of contemporaryit spawned was heresiographers fundamentally anda polemicists, © Copyrighted Material r continental import or rather a home-grown phenomenon with its own peculiarities. eformations, Counter- committed historians who tended to be preoccupied with constructing complicated e nglish revolutionary experiences and the manner in accounts of believers’ sufferings and martyrdom. by stressing supposed ideological antecedents. By turns organised and haphazard, r histories about aspects of an assumed ‘heritage’ of which the ‘ enaissance, Voyages of been ‘robbed’. lineage: a ‘progressive rationalist’ native r unashamedly teleological, anachronistic, anti-clerical and anti-imperialist thrust, eformation and the h in P. Collinson, ere, however, the initial impulse was to recover an indigenous 4 P. Collinson, ‘ e England. An Essay5 on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History t xploration, r hirty 89 Cromohs Virtual Seminars html>,www .1–6.ashgate.com www. ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www s .ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com w amuel, ‘British y ww.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com Godly People. Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism ears War. t 4 m owards a broader understanding of the early dissenting tradition’, m agisterial and arxist historians and a number e nglish Puritanism e m nglish tradition. arxist h istorians, 1880–1980: Part © Copyrighted Material e 5 nglish people’ had Characterised by an The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary o ne’, New Left Review ( l ondon, , 120 90 accompanied by a welcome reincorporation of religious beliefs into a grand narrative thata had gradually been transformed from a bourgeois revolution into lthough the revisionist shift in emphasis from tension to consensus was Varieties of 17th- and Early 18th-Century English Radicalism manifestation may, as Christopher underground roots. a continuous tradition, it was nonetheless conceded that these wars of religion in the certain contemporaries held beliefs stemming from the r practicaleformations Christianity, as derived well fromas early the Christianity. social agenda of the a shared vocabulary expressed in otherwisetlantic divergent ‘ © Copyrighted Material ‘the last and greatest triumph of the a r appropriated, their image successively refashioned in the service of rchipelagonew political hadeconceived ideological as a componentsseries of moments and, moreover, in context that rather than greatest of the heresiarchs of Jacob Boehme, and suggested that Winstanley’s e uropean radical reformation’, as the crucial element of a h s ill proposed, have had deep if largely ociety of of the Hill. Volume Two: Religion andg Politics in Seventeenth-Centuryf England n 6 riends, included chapters on the erman peasantry in the ew Varieties of C. e f uropean radical reformation’. 6 ormality: m t h estament and comprising the ‘core European Context ill, ‘ arxism’, delineated the 1549 7 and Contexts, 1640–49 J. f r rom m English Revolution o s adicalism’, 8 ne agisterial and www.ashgate.com www.ashgacott,te.c om www.ashgate.c l e oml www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashga a ollards to eveller’, ‘ te.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com spect of the . Bernstein, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English Political Instability in TRHS t l welve d evellers’, in C. igger’, ‘ e The Law of Freedom r Cromwell and Communism. Socialismnglish and Democracy in the Great r adical a eformation in 7 rticles of 1525. e r r ast evolution’, anter’ h a ill, nglian revolts The Collected Essays of Christopher © Copyrighted Material g Utopia TRHS ermany and was a utopian m oreover, it seemed . 8 s imilarly, e ngland thought the ‘social roots’ of ideas held by Winstanley and the lay in the ‘religion of the common people’: politically immature, medieval popular persecution in their homeland had brought the vivifying spirit of writings by Gerrard Winstanley, Radical Reformer on Winstanley while simultaneously insisting that he owed his religious doctrines vein, Christopher who had studied at of the © Copyrighted Material theories which have appeared with increasing maturity in all the great middle- class revolutions’. Protestant reformer executed during the i nterregnum, grouped Winstanley’s writings with those ‘communist broadcaster Righteousnes too compared Winstanley’s h society’, with ill, then a member of the Communist party of century Communist thought – particularly the fraternal, ‘left-wing’ m oscow and familiarised himself with t h hat is to say, doctrines disseminated by underground heretical sect the ‘a Communistenry Brailsford, pronounced Winstanley’s underworld’ before they fused with native lower class agrarian communist ideas, resurfacing in the ‘freedom of the 1640s’. m ore’s the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley 9 l Social Philosophy