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doi: 10.1017S0009640709990692
The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley. By Bryan W. Ball. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008. 236 pp. S62.50 paper.
We hear from time to lime of mortalists. but they - for all that Thomas Hobbes and John Milton dwelt in their midst - have not enjoyed the kind of profile that scholars, over the past decades, have constructed for other dogmaticians of questionable orthodoxy. Surely one reason for this is evidentiary: English mortalist opinions predating the mid-seventeenth century need to be teased out of source material that is relatively scant and likely to be oblique, elliptical, or hostile. Another reason, doubtless, has to do with the doctrinal trickiness of the subject: mortalism presents itself in distinguishable strands, but it is often a fine scantling that separates one strand from another, and there may be difficulties in determining whether a given mortalist voice utters on behalf of the soul's "sleep" or the soul's "death." Bryan Ball's book is the first dedicated study of early-modem English mortalism since Norman T. Burns's groundbreaking monograph of 1972, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton. Ball, a specialist in early-modem eschatology. generously acknowledges the high quality of the scholarship that informed Burns's monograph, and, fittingly, he frequently engages with conclusions drawn by Bums. But he establishes the need for a new account of mortalism: recent studies of likely subjects ignore mortalist dimensions that, by Ball's lights, should have been explored, and in several respects Ball takes his reader beyond significant limitations of scope and...