A study of the prophetic tradition in medieval England brings out its influence on contemporary politics and the contemporary elite.

The nature of political prophecy in the middle ages analysed, confirming its importance in the discussion of public affairs.

Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and 'non-rational' ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century."--Jacket.

Shows the general history of the political prophecy in England with reference to Continental activity in the same field.

Joanna Southcott (1750 – 1814) remains one of the most significant and extraordinary religious figures of her era. In an age of reason and enlightenment, her apocalyptic prophecies attracted tens of thousands of followers, and she captured international attention with her promise to bear a divine child. In this new intellectual biography Matthew Niblett unravels Southcott's writings, her context and her message to demonstrate why the prophetess was such a magnetic figure and to highlight the significance of her role in British religious history. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, this revealing study explains the formation of Southcott's apocalyptic theology, her treatment of the Bible, her relation with the Church, the network of clerical supporters she used and the striking originality of her message. In so doing, this book shines fresh light on religion and the politics of salvation in late Georgian England.

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion. Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O’Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott. See inside the book.