The Anarchy Of the Ranters and Other Libertines, the Hierarchy Of The Romanists, and Others Pretended Churches, Equally Refused and Refuted in a Two-fold Apology for the Church and People of God Called in Derision Quakers

A Quaker tract by prominent a Scottish Quaker and governor of East Jersey (later New Jersey), first published in 1674. Barclay portrays the more radical Puritans ("Ranters and Other Libertines") with their disorganization and "Romanists" (i.e. Catholics) with their extensive hierarchy as the two undesirable polar opposites the Quakers are sagely perched between. The Ranters (insofar as they were a coherent tendency and not a straw man created by conservatives) are of interest to historians of radical social movements for they were the undisputed vanguard of the English Revolution, advocating all sorts of heresies from public nudity to proto-communism to a sort of pre-Nietzschian amoralism. This text would be reprinted many times in the century following its initial publication, serving as a warning against the type of revolutionary excesses of the 17th century.