Book excerpt: During the mid-seventeenth century, Baptists existed on the fringes of religious life in England. Matthew C. Bingham examines this early group and argues that they did not see themselves as a part of a larger, all-encompassing Baptist movement. Rather, their rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans. Orthodox Radicals is a much needed complication of our understanding of Baptist identity, setting the early English Baptists in the cultural, political, and theological context of the wider puritan milieu out of which they arose.