Thanks to the work of legions of scholars, the millenarian expectations within large segments of the population in Cromwellian England have been carefully examined. The widespread belief that England, with its messianic leader 1 Cromwell, heralded the millennium is well known. Less well examined, perhaps, has been the cultural conceptions of the role of millenarian and messianic ideas in the "long" eighteenth century. Especially during the stable Hanoverian era - until the American and French Revolutions - the common place millennial expectations of the English Civil War appeared to recede. By the end of the eighteenth century, with the Napoleonic wars, millenarian views and interpretations underwent a minor renaissance but with nothing like the fervor, it is commonly thought, of the Puritan era when so many believed that the end was near. By the end of the eighteenth century, so the "official" story goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England such as David Hume had done too well their work of tarring such religious radicalism with the brush of "enthusiasm. " Happily, this "official" interpretation of the events of the early modern period - in which scholars have too often taken their cue from writers such as Hume and simply ignored millenarian contexts and expectations in the Age of Reason - has undergone a marked shift in the past twenty years.

Inhalt

1. The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s.- 2. Britain and the Beast: The Apocalypse and the Seventeenth-Century Debate about the Creation of the British State.- 3 A Whig Apocalypse: Astrology, Millenarianism, and Politics in England during the Restoration Crisis, 16781683.- 4. Robert Boyle on Knowledge of Nature in the Afterlife.- 5. Robert Boyle, the Conversion of the Jews, and Millennial Expectations.- 6. The Virgin, the Dynamo, and Newton's Prophetic History.- 7 The Mystery of This Restitution of All Things: Isaac Newton on the Return of the Jews.- 8. The Occult Bible: Hebraic Millenarianism in Eighteenth-Century England.- 9. David and Goliath: Jewish Conversion and Philo-Semitism in Late-Eighteenth-Century English Millenarian Thought.- 10. Caveat Emptor: Pre- and Postmillennialism in the Late Reformation Period.- 11. The Eschatology of Everyday Things, England, 16001800.