“A Universall Monarchy”

Chapter 1 analyzes a mid-seventeenth-century pamphlet exchange that suggests how global fantasies infuse writings that on their surface seem little interested in situating England on a world stage. In 1651, William Lilly, the “Christian astrologer,” responded to a Royalist Presbyterian’s pamphlet attack on the Parliamentarian cause. The two authors debated events of their time by exchanging prophecies that depended on the twinned notions of a Christian millennialism in which Christ would become a “universall monarch” over the whole world and of translatio imperii, fidei, and scientiae, the movement of government, faith, and learning from the East to the West. The coda adds an additional voice to the debate, triangulating the exchange between Lilly and the anonymous pamphleteer with a reader whose marginalia are preserved in a copy held by Purdue University. This exchange illustrates the fervor with which millennial ideas were being discussed throughout the seventeenth century.