LONDON'S BARBER-ELIJAH: THOMAS MOOR AND UNIVERSAL SALVATION IN THE 1690S

Abstract

A prominent feature of post-Reformation English theology is a strong tradition of plebeian heresy. English people, men and women, without knowledge of learned languages or the theological canon, derived original religious ideas from their own experiences or personal study of the Bible, as well as from an eclectic miscellany of other texts.England did not, of course, have a monopoly on plebeian heresy. The most celebrated early modern plebeian heretic known to us today is probably the Italian miller Menocchio, the subject of Carlo Ginzburg's study: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Trans. John and Ann Tedeschi; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Plebeian heretics often emerged from the artisan classes, possessing literacy and access to at least a small collection of books, always including the Bible. They elaborated their individual theologies outside both the dominant orthodoxy of the Anglican church and that of the major dissenting bodies.