Early in the morning of 19 July 1591, two Puritan gentlemen, Edmund Coppinger and Henry Arthington, mounted a cart in Cheapside to announce that they had discovered the messiah. William Hackett, a Presbyterian of dubious moral character, had assumed ‘the office and spirite of S. Iohn Baptist, affirming, that hee was sent thither by God, to prepare the way of the Lord before his second comming to iudgement’. 1 Arthington and Coppinger, viewing themselves as the two witnesses of God predicted in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 11:1–12), believed that Hackett had been sent to overthrow episcopacy and Elizabeth I, and inaugurate a new era of perfected church government on earth. The authorities were not amused, and Hackett was executed. Roughly two hundred years later, and several thousand miles to the west, an altogether more respectable New Jersey Presbyterian preacher, David Austin, predicted Christ’s return for the fourth Sunday of May 1796. When the prophecy failed, Austin was not imprisoned or attacked by concerned authorities. Instead his flock (which included a number of politicians) humoured his preaching, until finally losing patience and dismissing him as minister as his prophecies continued unabated. Undeterred, the preacher fell to designing wharves and houses to prepare the Jews for their prophesied return to Palestine. 2
These two examples, neatly bookending the period covered in this collection, might be taken as representative of the way in which interpretation of prophecy developed from the sixteenth until the late eighteenth centuries. What was seen as threatening and politically destabilising to Elizabethan politicians appeared eccentric, but largely harmless, to enlightened Americans on the cusp of the 1800s. Yet history never develops in such neat, sweeping, and clear-cut movements, despite what secularisation theory may seem to imply at times. 3 To problematise this narrative, two other stories might be considered. In 1587, the Puritan preacher William Perkins wrote A Fruitfull Dialogue Concerning the End of the World. Here, he was quick to condemn the sort of credulous acceptance of prophecy that led to Hackett’s radical actions. In a dialogue between ‘Christian’ and ‘Worldling’, the latter betrays a popular interest and excitement in prophecy—finding prophecies hidden on stone walls, in popular ballads and breathless discussions with neighbours, as well as in books dedicated to the subject. ‘Christian’ is unimpressed: ‘I make as little account of these verses as of Merlin’s drunken prophecies, or the tales of Robin Hood.’ 4 As the godly man reminds his credulous interlocutor, there are several signs that need to be fulfilled before the world will end—he should concentrate on holy living rather than prophetic speculation if he wants to be blessed.
Roughly two hundred years later and several thousand miles to the west in Rhode Island, Jemima Wilkinson arose from a serious illness reborn as the second coming of Christ, or the Publick Universal Friend. As the Friend she attracted significant attention from the press, who repeatedly slandered her, concerned at her refusal to accept any clear designation of gender or race, and speculating on her political and moral aims. 5 While Jemima was founding a community in New York State in the 1790s, across the Atlantic former naval officer Richard Brothers was declaring himself the ‘nephew of the Almighty’, and claiming that George III should surrender the crown in his favour. Against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Brothers’s actions caused enough concern for the government to declare him criminally insane and imprison him in an asylum for some eleven years. 6
These incidents are merely snapshots of events which need to be placed within a larger matrix of historical developments to fully make sense. But they serve as reminders that while a narrative of ‘disenchantment’ or secularisation might be read into the period 1500–1800, that in reality predictions, prophecies, and speculation about the end times cannot be slotted into neat historical boxes. As Perkins’ work shows, Elizabethan writers might find prophecy as politically harmless and eccentric (albeit spiritually unhelpful) as those who dismissed Austin in late-eighteenth-century New Jersey; while governments and the press might be equally alarmed by the political dangers of the prophetic form in 1591 and 1795. While, as the anonymous ‘Freethinker’ bewailed in that year, it may be ‘strange, that any man in his senses should, in this Enlightened age, be ambitious of the name and character of a prophet’, 7 plenty continued to aspire to the title.
This book attempts to shed some light on why this was the case within a particular geographical and historical context. Taking as its frame the transatlantic world in the period 1500–1800, contributors explore the variety of ways in which prophetic discourse could be appropriated, transformed, and reworked as new lands and peoples were discovered, and unprecedented political revolutions were dealt with and debated. The aim of this introduction is therefore threefold. First, the choice of geographical focus will to be justified. The Atlantic paradigm has been both defended and heavily criticised in recent work, and it is important that the reader is aware of the benefits that adopting an Atlantic approach to examining prophecy can offer. At the same time, it would be remiss not to highlight continuing difficulties with the paradigm. Second, it introduces the reader to the importance of prophecy within this context. Starting from the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Columbus, prophecy had an important role to play in shaping the way in which Europeans understood the new people groups, cultures, and landscapes they discovered. Prophecies of a future millennial kingdom and of a church in the wilderness motivated emigration; predictions of the discovery of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel encouraged evangelisation of indigenous peoples; while prophecy might also be seen as playing an important part in encouraging rebellions and revolutions, as concerns relating to both Hackett and Brothers suggest. Finally, this introduction will lead the reader into the book itself, with a brief summary of each of the chapters. The book as a whole aims to provide an accessible but rigorous overview of the cultural, religious, and political impact of prophecy in the transatlantic world from 1500 to 1800. While it cannot claim to be exhaustive in scope, it aims to highlight important recent work in the field, suggest new approaches, and offer ways in which the study of prophecy might develop into the next decade of research.
1.1 Defining Key Concepts: Prophecy in the Atlantic
This book’s title employs two related, but distinct, terms—prophecy and eschatology. Neither term is unproblematic. ‘Prophecy’ can refer, quite simply, to the statement of a prophet. As such, it implies inspiration from a deity, with the prophet speaking as their god’s mouthpiece. The content of their discourse might highlight moral failings, offer predictions of the future, or be in a spiritual language which requires interpretation. 8 The primary role of the Old Testament prophets was often to engage in moral criticism of the society that surrounded them, calling God’s people back into his service. In the early modern world, a number of different people might be described as (or describe themselves as) a prophet. These might be marginal figures such as Hackett, mythical prophets from the distant past such as Merlin, more detailed constructions from recent folklore such as Mother Shipton, or even someone as innocuous as the local Church of England minister. As one role of the prophet was to interpret the word of God, early modern Protestants sometimes described the regular exposition of the word as a form of prophecy. 9 In this sense, John Calvin has recently been described as a prophet. 10
But prophecy, in a popular sense at least, could also refer to predictions. Prophecies relating to the future, whether to the outcome of events should the prophet’s hearers not repent, or promises of ultimate redemption, were also part of both biblical and folk prophetic traditions. Here prophecy directly intersected with eschatology (the study of the ‘last things’). Eschatology could be personal (as in the Catholic tradition of the four last things: death, judgement, hell, and heaven), or cosmic (as in the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Revelation). When prophecy focused on its eschatological elements it became inherently politicised, as predictions of change could have alarming implications for authorities. At times of political turmoil, as the examples of Hackett and Wilkinson suggest, it could be subversive and used as a way of promoting rebellion—as seen in the predictions during the Pilgrimage of Grace which rose against Henry VIII in 1536–1537. Tudor governments therefore legislated against prophecy in 1541–1542, 1549–1550 and 1563. Yet at the same time, prophecy could be employed by those in power to support their positions, and to suggest divine endorsement of their rule; it remains ‘a matter of conflicting interpretation … ever unstable and dynamic’. 11
As this volume is focused on prophecy and eschatology, it is this more predictive sense of prophecy which predominates in this book. The precise form examined varies from author to author, with chapters moving between elite, popular, and radical contexts across religious traditions. Prophecy here is used to describe something more than a general sense of providence, although this remained an important part of prophetic speculation and an essential element in the shared worldview between Britain and America into the early nineteenth century. 12 In particular, many of the contributors focus on prophecies which might be described as millennial in nature. The term refers in the first instance to Revelation 20:1–6, in which Christ returns to earth and reigns with his saints for a period of a thousand years while Satan is bound. As a number of chapters in this collection highlight, the belief in the coming of the millennium was important across the Atlantic world in the early modern period. The precise nature that this millennium would take differed from group to group, and examinations of millennialism often break it down into three distinct forms: premillennialism (in which Christ returns before the millennium and thus inaugurates it supernaturally), postmillennialism (in which Christ returns at the end of the millennium, which has been inaugurated through a Christianisation of the world), and amillennialism (in which the millennium is not interpreted literally, but instead seen to refer to a spiritual state). 13 Although such clear-cut categories do not fully apply to pre-eighteenth-century eschatology, they remain a useful way of understanding the core of millennial debates. 14
In attempting to comprehend the lands that were ‘discovered’ by Europeans in the late fifteenth century, the prophetic portions of scripture provided one way of situating the previously unknown portions of the world within existing maps of meaning. Columbus interpreted his voyages though...