The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley. By Bryan W. Ball. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 236 pp. $62.50 paper.

摘要

We hear from time to time of mortalists, but they—for all that Thomas Hobbesnand John Milton dwelt in their midst—have not enjoyed the kind of profile that scholars, over the past decades, have constructed for other dogmaticians ofnquestionable orthodoxy. Surely one reason for this is evidentiary: Englishnmortalist opinions predating the mid-seventeenth century need to be teasednout of source material that is relatively scant and likely to be oblique,nelliptical, or hostile. Another reason, doubtless, has to do with the doctrinalntrickiness of the subject: mortalism presents itself in distinguishable strands,nbut it is often a fine scantling that separates one strand from another, andnthere may be difficulties in determining whether a given mortalist voicenutters on behalf of the soul’s “sleep” or the soul’s “death.” Bryan Ball’s booknis the first dedicated study of early-modern English mortalism since NormannT. Burns’s groundbreaking monograph of 1972, Christian Mortalism fromnTyndale to Milton. Ball, a specialist in early-modern eschatology, generouslynacknowledges the high quality of the scholarship that informed Burns’snmonograph, and, fittingly, he frequently engages with conclusions drawn bynBurns. But he establishes the need for a new account of mortalism: recentnstudies of likely subjects ignore mortalist dimensions that, by Ball’s lights,nshould have been explored, and in several respects Ball takes his readernbeyond significant limitations of scope and conception within which Burnsnhad worked. He extends Burns’s temporal range by looking back, briefly, tonWycliffite and Lollard theology, by compensating for Burns’s “indefensible”n(15) omission of John Locke, and by carrying the story of English mortalismnthrough the eighteenth century. He considers texts, dating within the periodnstudied by Burns but overlooked by the latter, whose anthropologicalnlanguage he considers either determinedly mortalist or at least susceptible ofnmortalist interpretation. He works into his doctrinal survey somencoordinating narrative threads not evident in Burns: the seedbed of Englishnmortalism was Anabaptist-inflected Kent and Sussex, whence emerged thenmost voluble Baptist mortalists of the mid-seventeenth century; the earlynpreponderance of the soul-sleep strand of mortalism in England was destinednfor an overturning with the triumph of the more authentically mortalist soul-ndeath strand, whose proponents carried the day—and eventually colonizednthe establishment—during the second half of the seventeenth century andnthroughout the eighteenth century.