From Eschatology to Arian Heresy: The Case of Francis Kett (d. 1589)

Abstract

Considerable attention has recently been given to the subject of radical ideas in English religion, especially in the period of the Civil War, as Christopher Hill'sThe World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolutionperhaps best illustrates. Nonetheless, much of the story of English radical religion—its sources, milieu, and impact—remains obscure, especially in the Elizabethan period, and the modern investigator is scarcely satisfied with the comment of the seventeenth-century heresiographer, Daniel Featley, who argued, in explaining the rise of heresy, that “it is moste certaine, that where there is a propension in any mans minde to any olde heresie, the malice of the Devil easily supplyeth the want of reading.” Did the radical religious ideas of the Civil War period spring up suddenly out of the tensions of Puritanism or had such ideas long flourished on the margins of the Puritan movement? To what extent were such ideas indebted to continental influences such as the Anabaptists? If indigenous, to what aspect of English religion should one turn for the context and basis of such developments?