This is a book about about a book—or more properly, about three books, the three parts of Gangraena written by the intemperate London Presbyterian Thomas Edwards and published in 1646.

Gangraena, i. Gangraena: or A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (London, 1646)

Gangraena, ii. The Second Part of Gangraena: or A fresh and further Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and dangerous Proceedings of the Sectaries of this time (1st edn., London, 1646)

Gangraena, iii. The third part of Gangraena or: A new and higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries of these times (London, 1646)

Gangraena, Part One, title page

Gangraena, Part Two, title page

Gangraena, Part Three, title page

These were in their own time, and have remained, notorious for their extremism, their starkly polarized world-view, and their intolerance. […] Gangraena provided horrified detail of the unorthodox religious speculation, lay preaching, and sectarian congregations unleashed by civil war, and Edwards urged their suppression, if necessary through force. He called for the elimination of ideas and books he believed transgressed God's truth, for the burning of other books by the common hangman, and contemplated with enthusiasm the death penalty for blasphemy. Although some contemporaries hailed Edwards as a new Augustine, most would now agree with the judgement of pioneering radical historian of John Milton, David Masson, that he was 'on the whole', 'a nasty kind of Christian'. […] Gangraena was probably the most controversial and the most influential of all the printed productions of the 1640s, and did more than any of the other books to polarize parliamentarians as they won the first civil war and agonized over peace. Edwards's prose, luxuriating in the horrors it condemned, was heavily indebted to a wide range of sources: other books, manuscript testimony, and London conversations. Gangraena was generically complex and its author was deeply self-conscious about processes of book production and the power of print. […]

These Trades-men are Preachers… (1647)

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Note on References

1. Introduction: Approaches to Thomas Edwards's Gangraena

2. Gangraena as Heresiography

3. 'Like a Universal Leprosie Over-spread this Whole Kingdom': City and Provinces in Gangraena

4. 'Books Lately Printed': Gangraena and the World of Print

5. Edwards, Gangraena, and Presbyterian Mobilization

6. Conclusions

Bibliography

Index