ABSTRACT

This chapter considers movements and ideas that challenged fundamental political, religious or social axioms of their day. It examines the usefulness of the term radical', the existence of a radical tradition, and the nature of radicalism across geographical, cultural, and temporal spaces. The chapter concerns with dating and attaching prophetic time periods to historical events and eras, the belief in imminent millenarian fulfilment. It also concerns with advancing apocalyptic beliefs and applying them to contemporary political and religious conditions in the 1690s. The chapter demonstrates that this thought had developed within the Protestant mainstream of more moderate commentary on Church and State. It argues against common historiographical perceptions, instead contending that apocalyptic thought remained pertinent beyond the mid seventeenth-century crises and that it was not solely a medium to articulate political and religious revolt. The chapter examines the menace of enthusiasm and sedition was blunted by time and circumstance.