Flourishing briefly in the aftermath of the English Revolution (1649 1650), the Ranters have been seen as the ultimate counter-cultural group or movement of seventeenth-century England. Their apparent rejection of sin, hell and all moral constraints, authorities and limitations imposed from above has drawn considerable attention to them as illustrative of an irreligious popular culture and the determination of the people to have a revolution of their own making. Acting out a plebeian permissiveness in denial of the Protestant ethic at the moment of its achievement of dominance, they have...