Description
Book SynopsisDuring the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ''s return would mean for England''s body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writersincluding Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.
Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal chur
Trade Review
National Reckonings is a valuable addition to scholarship on the early-modern understanding of Judgment Day... Hackenbracht's scholarship is solid and needs to be considered and discussed.
* Choice *
National Reckonings succeeds in detailing the religious texture of early modern nationalism by offering a rich early modern social horizon, one in which ecclesia and the faithful remnant hold power alongside (often beyond) the emerging nation-state... National Reckonings will certainly appeal to Miltonists and scholars of the English revolution looking for a sophisticated yet lucid explication of the biblical roots of early modern political thought.
* Renaissance Quarterly *
National Reckonings offers a short, lucid, and provocative rereading of some key (and some unjustly neglected) texts of the tumultuous mid-seventeenth-century England. Hackenbracht's prose moves the reader easily and clearly among languages, authors, and genres. His command of Greek and Latin is impressive (he does his own translations of texts in both languages) and he renders the often-obscure prose of writers like Thomas Vaughan and Abiezer Coppe easily accessible in his paraphrases. This [is an] intriguing, thoughtful, and well-written book.
* Milton Quarterly *
With fresh readings of canonical figures such as Milton and Hobbes, as well as lesser-known religious and literary figures, National Reckonings provides a helpful resource for scholars of early modern religious and political thought.
* Sixteenth Century Journal *
