Hear about Gangraena by Thomas Edwards, a book attacking the religious division in the city of London after the English Civil War

DAVID COMO: Gangraena, by Thomas Edwards, was published in 1646 at the end of the English Civil War. That war pitted the followers of King Charles I against the supporters of Parliament. The conflict tore England into pieces, not least by fermenting religious divisions, divisions that were occasioned by the rise of new religious ideas and novel religious sectarian groupings that rose up in the wake of the chaos of the civil wars.

Nowhere were those divisions more pronounced than in the city of London, the epicenter of English religious, political, and cultural life. Now, it was to try to contain those religious divisions that Thomas Edwards, a London minister, took up his pen to write Gangraena. Gangraena was an impassioned attack on these religious sects and these novel religious opinions, which Edwards saw as being a kind of cancer or a gangrene spreading through the body politic.

The pages you see here show Edwards attacking a fellow London minister, a prominent clergyman named John Goodwin. Now, although Edwards earned enormous notoriety through his attack on the sects and his book Gangraena was tremendously popular, his attempt to contain these religious divisions ultimately proved futile. Even after the reestablishment of peace in 1660 and the reestablishment of order, religious division persisted.

Now, this legacy of religious pluralism was one of the chief and most pronounced consequences of the English Civil War and the upheavals of the mid-17th century.