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9781501731075

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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 *

A work of cultural excavation, National Reckonings-intelligent, inclusive, and incisive-focuses on the Book of Revelation as an index to Protestant beliefs and then brackets its Last Judgment as a key to making political sense of events in Milton's England. In a century rife with eschatological expectations, not just Milton but Hobbes and Winstanley, Coppe, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, as well as Anna Trapnel, illustrate the multiple ways in which eschatology posed a critique of and challenge to a nation that had become the emanating center of the expected millennium and of the utopian politics and creative theology that were to be its harbinger. The alpha and the omega of this study, Milton's writings are shot through with apocalyptic rumblings and yearnings, eschatological immanence and delay, as well as secularizing tendencies, including an optimistic view of human agency and of a world renewing itself, that were to become the gift of Milton and his age to the modern world. -- Joseph Wittreich, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of <I>Why Milton Matters</I> By focusing on the incompatibility of nationhood and Christian universalism, National Reckonings offers a compelling study of the literary imagination and political conflict. The lessons of this historicist study remain urgently important for us now. -- Eric Song, Associate Professor of English Literature, Swarthmore College, and author of <I>Dominion Underserved</I>

A work of cultural excavation, National Reckonings-intelligent, inclusive, and incisive-focuses on the Book of Revelation as an index to Protestant beliefs and then brackets its Last Judgment as a key to making political sense of events in Milton's England. In a century rife with eschatological expectations, not just Milton but Hobbes and Winstanley, Coppe, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, as well as Anna Trapnel, illustrate the multiple ways in which eschatology posed a critique of and challenge to a nation that had become the emanating center of the expected millennium and of the utopian politics and creative theology that were to be its harbinger. The alpha and the omega of this study, Milton's writings are shot through with apocalyptic rumblings and yearnings, eschatological immanence and delay, as well as secularizing tendencies, including an optimistic view of human agency and of a world renewing itself, that were to become the gift of Milton and his age to the modern world. -- Joseph Wittreich, The Graduate Center, CUNY, author of <I>Why Milton Matters</I> By focusing on the incompatibility of nationhood and Christian universalism, National Reckonings offers a compelling study of the literary imagination and political conflict. The lessons of this historicist study remain urgently important for us now. -- Eric Song, Swarthmore College, and author of <I>Dominion Underserved</I>

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Ryan Hackenbracht is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University. He specializes in British Renaissance literature, particularly the works of John Milton and Thomas Hobbes.

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