ABSTRACT
News from the New Jerusalem opens a window onto a community of fellow-travellers who took divergent paths in 1649. The Black-Spread-Eagle essay argues that individuals coming from a cluster of social networks, which had one nexus at Giles Calvert's bookshop, took part in the heated debate about Church settlement and religious toleration from a shared antinomian and spiritualist standpoint. Calvert was the only stationer who had such a large number of publications, except for the printers whose trade was heavily determined by serving either Parliament or the Council of State for a long time. Calvert's bookshop was the community which corresponded in News from the New Jerusalem and from which the Digger and 'Ranter' moments of the English Revolution emerged. 'Unity in variety', which according to Jonathan Scott characterises radicalism as a process, represented both the truth and substance of religion at the 'Black-Spread-Eagle'.
