Abiezer Coppe
From Freepedia
Abiezer Coppe (1619-1672) was one of the English Ranters and a writer of prophetic religious pamphlets.
One of Coppe's major works is the Fiery Flying Roll of 1649, a (highly heretical) tirade against inequality and hypocrisy which vividly evokes the charged and visionary atmosphere that swept over England during the civil war and interregnum.
While Coppe's views were unpopular with Royalists, they were equally disliked by Parliamentarians, and shortly after the Fiery Flying Roll was published he was imprisoned at Newgate Prison and the book burned.
Coppe was later released and celebrated by publishing Coppe's return to the ways of righteousness, in which he retracted his previous heresies, while adding a few more. Like Lodowick Muggleton and the Diggers' leader Gerrard Winstanley, Coppe combined an egalitarian social vision with an apocalyptic religious one.
Coppe has been written about by Norman Cohn and the Marxist historians A. L. Morton and Christopher Hill.
See also
References
- Selected Writings, Abiezer Coppe, edited and introdued by Andrew Hopton. 1987, Aporia Press, London. ISBN 0-948518-25-1
- The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn. 1957
