The English Radical Imagination Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 [Hardcover]

This study addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Nicholas McDowell challenges the divide between elite and popular culture in the seventeenth century and argues that the radical writing of the English Revolution is a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.

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McDowell's book provides a fresh reading of radical texts as complex literary artifacts, the works of sophisticated and well-read social critics. We can no longer turn to these texts to encounter the voices of unlettered mechanics, and we must revise our conceptions of the audience for whom the texts were written --Renaissance Quarterly

Surprising links and connections are posited here, and this study provides a rich resource for others, as well as being interesting throughout. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

This is a small but important book in which Nicholas McDowell shows clearly that the English revolution and regicide had deep roots in the puritanical, dissenting Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras and that it was importantly educated men and not base mechanicals who stirred up trouble in church and state and used humanist values to unseat the elite in the long-established institutions. --Biblioth?que d'Humanisme et Renaissance