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John Morrill, editor The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Oxford University Press, 2,368 pages, $765 Oliver Cromwell had a way with words, and plenty of them. But his [...]

In the Western world today, Peter Ackroyd is one of the finest writers of biography, history, and fiction. His most recent project turns attention to the field of religion, setting [...]

Peter K. Andersson Fool: In Search of Henry VUI's Closest Man. Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $27.95 Should you answer a fool according to his folly? This question haunts the [...]

The article explores why the republic established after the English Civil War and regicide of British King Charles I, failed. Topics considered include the religious minority that led republican forces during the Civil War, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell, laws enacted and enforced by the Commonwealth, Congregationalist minister John Owen, and the restoration of the monarchy offered to King Charles II.

Would you know how to discern these signs, there are myriads of books upon the market today which will help you. --Sydney Watson, Scarlet and Purple Exactly at eleven, someone [...]

No one studying the impact of Evangelicalism’s most successful cultural products could doubt their mass-market appeal both within and beyond the ‘conservative revolution’ of contemporary America. With concerns to fashion the spirituality of their readers, the Left Behind novels (1995–2007) represent the ‘first outlines of a fully commercialised, fully mediatised Christian blockbuster culture’. The series dramatizes the end-time expectations of a popular evangelical system of eschatological thinking, known as dispensational pre-millennialism. This system maintains that Christ could return imminently to ‘rapture’ true believers to heaven; that this rapture will be followed by a catastrophic seven-year period known as the ‘Great Tribulation’, in which the Antichrist will rise to power to persecute those who, despite being ‘left behind’, have converted to evangelical faith; and that the tribulation will end with the ‘glorious appearing’ of Christ, the last judgement and the inauguration of a thousand-year reign of peace known as the millennium. Despite the complexity of its theology, the series has sold over sixty-five million copies since the publication of their eponymous debut novel in 1995, and has been identified as the best-selling fiction series in American literary history. After 1998, successive instalments in the series topped the New York Timesbest-seller lists. The seventh novel in the series, The Indwelling(2000), topped the best-seller lists of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journaland USA Today.

In May 1653, John Murcot, a well-connected Merton College Oxford graduate, travelled to Cork to preach at the request of local Puritans. As a minister adhering to the Independent system of church order, he had already faced a series of challenges to the fulfilment of his clerical calling. In the 1640s, his studies had been interrupted when Royalist troops occupied his university; on his first journey to Dublin, in 1651, he had narrowly escaped capture at the hands of pirates in the Irish Sea. In Cork, Murcot's ministry met with much success until he became entangled in a controversy that threatened to tear apart the local Puritan administration and, more widely, the Irish Puritan consensus.