On 16 November 1582 John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelly, gathered in the study of Dee's home in Mortlake, a small town located southwest of London on the river Thames. It was five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and the latest in a series of dramatic events was unfolding. This event, like the events that preceded it and those that followed, involved an extraordinary cast of characters and contained a significant philosophical message. In Mortlake, England's most important natural philosopher was preparing to engage in what was becoming a habitual exercise: conversing with angels, whom Dee referred to as his “scholemasters,” about matters relevant to his study of the natural and supernatural worlds.

No phenomenon reveals the otherness, the alien quality of early modern culture as dramatically as reputed cases of demonic possession. Previously a rare and rather marginal phenomenon, demonic possession became a new plague in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Physically the affliction manifested itself in recurrent fits, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, difficulty eating and drinking, bug-eyes, and extreme contortions of the body. Verbally demoniacs sometimes ranted incoherently; other times, their words were offensively clear to those around them. Speaking with the supposed voice of the devil, demoniacs uttered blasphemies and obscenities, denied fundamental Christian dogmas, and mocked figures of authority.

Specialists may recall Andrew Marvell's defense of John Milton in The Second Part of The Rehearsall Transpros'd against the attacks of Samuel Parker, once an associate of sorts but by 1673 a champion of religious intolerance. Parker had written in his Reproof that The Rehearsall Transpros'd afforded “as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as any we meet with in the writings of J.M.”; and toward the end of The Second Part Marvell makes a point of rebutting this claim as yet another instance of Parker's malicious immoderation. He allows that it was Milton's “misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be toss'd on the wrong side, and [that] he writ Flagrante bello certain dangerous Treatises.”

The famous army debates held at Putney in 1647 provide us with some remarkable insights into the misgivings of the men who were soon to bring about the trial and execution of their king. Their very practical need to placate the then powerful “Leveller” faction within the army drew the “Grandees” into talks which clearly reveal the limits of their revolutionary aspirations. The principal objection of both Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton to the proposals of the Levellers is also the most telling: both men saw in the proposed Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People, a threat to the current economic order, an order based upon the ownership of property by a relatively small number of men.