Reviewed by Emily Clark | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 620 words from this article are provided below; about 654 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Emily Clark | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. By Susan Juster. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. x, 276. $39.95.) Reviewed by Emily Clark , Lewis and Clark College
"That a poor madman should be under such an unhappy delusion as to believe himself inspired, is not unprecedented; but that such a man, in so enlightened a city as London, should fill for a moment the public ear, and employ the public tongue, is a humiliating consideration for those who wish to feel proud of their country, or of human nature" (p.179). This indictment of the London prophet Richard Brothers in a British periodical in 1795 neatly captures the plight of revolutionary-era British and American prophets that stands at the center of Susan Juster's study of millenarianism between 1765 and 1815. Making use of the public sphere newly constituted by cheap print and coffeehouse discourse, her subjects struggled to steer a safe course for religious inspiration through the Age of Reason. Juster suggests that their journey was not necessarily destined for failure by insisting that the Enlightenment was not simply the dispassionate deployment of human reason against ignorance, superstition, and tyrannies religious and political. "The elusive admixture of primitive occult desires and modern intellectual conceits" is, she asserts, "a more accurate description of the phenomenon we simplistically call 'the Enlightenment'" (p. 16). Juster's analysis of the prophets' failure to resolve the tensions inherent in this admixture and to reconcile the religious realm of feeling and experience with the qualities of civility and reason that undergirded post-revolutionary republicanism creates a new narrative for the history of Anglo-American millenarianism. She advances in fresh, sometimes startling, ways the important discussion of the subject opened by Ruth Bloch, Nathan Hatch, and others.	1
Armed with an admirable command of the relevant historiographies, Juster rejects the integrity of an unbroken millennialist tradition stretching from the radical sectarianism of the English Civil War to the populist visionaries and dispensationalists of the nineteenth century. The 1790s, in particular, took Anglo-American prophets in new directions that represented distinct breaks with their seventeenth-century predecessors. Most aspects of their experimentation led to dead ends. When millenarianism was revived in the nineteenth century, it was by the likes of Joseph Smith and William Miller, visionaries who reprised the dramatic extravagance of the civil war sectarians in ways the prophets of the 1790s would never have dared. The revolutionary-era prophets did bequeath a legacy to their successors, however. The public sphere's building blocks of print culture and commercialization were at the center of nineteenth-century prophets' strategies to succeed in the emerging marketplace of religion.	2
As in the era of the English Civil War, the turmoil of the revolutionary age provided especially fertile soil for the flowering of religious experimentation infused with chiliasm. There is an understandable temptation to view the prophets of the late eighteenth century as faithful heirs of such apocalyptic and ecstatic sectarians as the Ranters, Muggletonians, and Fifth Monarchists. There were, to be sure, similarities. In both eras, prognostications of violence and doom figured large, divine inspiration was often signaled through kinetic expression, and prevailing constructions of gender were contested. The later cohort of prophets, however, was distinguished by its aspiration to align itself with, rather than against, the prevailing political and cultural power. Both republicanism and the Enlightenment encouraged that stance with the recognition of the individual's right to participation in government and capacity to perceive the truth for himself without the mediation of a didactic learned elite. Revolutionary-era visionaries with ordinary backgrounds proclaimed the accessibility of God's plan to all, and their unlikely emergence as prophets embodied the democratic nature of divine revelation.	. . .

There are about 654 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.