Spectres of John Ball

James Crossley is Research Professor in Bible, Society, and Politics at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Academic Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements (CenSAMM), and Professor of Bible and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. He is author of numerous books and articles on Christian Origins, reception history of the Bible, and English politics and religion, reception history of the Bible, including Cults, Martyrs and Good Samaritans: Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse (Pluto, 2018). The website John Ball, English Legend provides images and resources discussed in Spectres of John Ball.

• 1 Introduction: 1381 2 The Quest for the Historical John Ball 3 Exit Ball: Late Medieval Receptions 4 Ball and the English Reformation 5 Ghosts of 1381: Uneasy Heresies, Radicalisms, and Discontents in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean England 6 The Priest of Baal in Revolutionary England 7 Perverted Liberty and the End of Stuart England: Ball among Whigs, Tories, Jacobites, and Other Mobs 8 Georgian John: From Mob Rule to Reasonable Demands 9 Revolution, Once Again: A Freeborn Englishman in the Late Eighteenth Century 10 The Second Coming of John Ball: John Baxter, Robert Southey, and 1790s Radicalism 11 After Waterloo: The Poet Laureate’s John Ball 12 ‘Peaceably If We May, Forcibly If We Must’: Ball among the Chartists 13 Haranguing after Chartism: The Making of the Victorian Ball 14 Class Struggle among the Historians 15 William Morris: Delaying Ball’s New World 16 Still Dreaming of John Ball 17 Red John? Ball after the Great War 18 Bolshevik Ball 19 Cold War Ball 20 Rodney Hilton: Ball at the End of Historical Materialism? 21 Ball after 1968 22 1381/1981 23 Twenty-First Century Ball 24 Epilogue