A Theological Basis for Radicalism in Seventeenth Century England

Abstract

This paper has two purposes, or more specifically, makes two suggestions: First, that in the discipline that has been called intellectual history, ideas cannot be divorced from the men who possessed them, and second, that in seventeenth century England the ideas possessed by man caused them to respond to alterations in their lives in ways which ultimately produced novel conceptions of their places in society and of their relationships with their rulers, and on a more basic level, novel conceptions of themselves. The two are interrelated in that the second implies the first.