The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

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During the seventeenth century their voices were being raised—and heard—more vociferously and eloquently as the years went by.

The drawback of such a high level survey is that the detailed pieces, particularly in the political realm of shifting alliances and changing titles, can be very confusing when painted with such broad strokes.In 1633 his son and current King Charles republished the book, not only encouraging such a culture of festivals but making the reading of the book mandatory (p.

Of the two, Jonathan Healey is a little less shy about throwing in the occasional modern reference point or buzz phrase, for example in presenting the religious conflicts of this period as a 'culture war' pitting Puritan killjoys against fun loving cavaliers. I was curious to learn more about the period based on an essay on 17th century Puritanism by Marianne Robinson in her 5-star classic What are we doing here? What Healey doesn’t show (something common to many chroniclers of the period) is where the radicals that seized the NMA and thus control of the English political agenda came from. The rise of print media in the form of pamphlets and journals was as revolutionary in the 17th century as the rise of social media has been in the 21st. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.The author compares this period of devastating upheaval to where England is now: facing the birth of a new world. This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, 'was blazing a path toward our own. He tackles big subjects – religious dissent, the legal system – but hitches them to piquant stories about individuals previously unknown to history . And Healey's history open my eyes to a century of much broader and deeper change than I had imagined.

This created a first-of-its-kind “culture war” in which independent preachers and congregations challenged the hegemony of the Church of England.Healey is scathing in his judgment (and, refreshingly, never afraid to judge) about this “man of blood” who in the 1640s led his country into two needless civil wars, describing him as a “stuffy authoritarian… never ruthless enough to be a successful tyrant”, though he concedes, as did Rubens, that the king had a good eye for a painting. I would rather think that both popular history and lunch at the dons' table at Oxford have theme and humor, and as their goal communication of the spirit and incident of a time. In his wide-ranging new history of revolutionary England, Jonathan Healey has given us a masterly account of a period that urgently needs to be reclaimed and recognised for its importance and interest. Once journalists get their hands on them,those curt, day-to-day messages can be just a tad embarrassing — as this week’s expletive-laden evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry confirms.