From The Pen Of The English Revolution Historian Professor Christopher Hill- A Short Note On -"Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century" (1958)

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Book Review

Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958)

In this expansively footnoted book Professor Hill, as he has done in his other work, connects the dramatic break up of traditional agrarian English society; the resulting vast increase of 'master-less' men not bound to traditional authority and potentially receptive to new ideas; the widespread availability of the protestant Bible brought about by the revolution in printing and thus permitting widespread distribution to the masses; the effects of the Protestant Reformation on individual responsibility; the discrediting of the theology of the divine right of kings; the role of the priesthood of all believers that foreshadow a very modern concept of the validity of individual religious expression; radical interpretations of equality and primitive communism, particularly the work of Gerrard Winstanley ; the Puritan ethic and many more subjects of interests to bring to life what the common people who hitherto had barely entered the stage of history were reading, watching, thinking and doing.

His central premise here is that it is hard to understand the political, social and economic developments that led to revolution and later the creation of a major capitalist state in England without reference to the literature of the times. To buttress his argument Hill writes a series of interesting essays ranging from the critical important of the enforcement or non enforcement of state censorship for literary freedom; the symbolic importance of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; the various literary battles between pro-parliamentary and pro-royalist writers especially his muse John Milton; an nice appreciative of Samuel Pepys’ Diary and a long overdue debunking of that of John Evelyn as sources for an appreciation of the fads and fashions of the times ; and a look at a couple of ultra-royalist restoration writers, Samuel Butler and the Earl of Rochester. In all a very good exposition of his ideas on the relationship between literature and political action. Of course, for the interpretation of the English Revolution, it never hurts to have John Milton as your muse. As I have pointed out before in other reviews one should read Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down first then you are really ready for the exoteric here. Fair enough?

From The Pen Of The English Revolution Historian Professor Christopher Hill- A Short Note On “Liberty Against The Law”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Professor Christopher Hill

BOOK REVIEW

LIBERTY AGAINST THE LAW, CHRISTOPHER HILL, PENQUIN, NEW YORK, 1998

The late pre-eminent historian of the underclasses (and of their more well-known “organizations,” the quakers, sheathed and un-sheathed, shakers, fakers, rakers, and partakers) of the English Revolution, Professor Christopher Hill, has taken the myriad literary and cultural ideas, serious and zany, in some case very zany although not without some parallels today, or rather perhaps better said, the 1960s New Left times, that surfaced during the period between 1620-1720, the heart of the conversion of England from an agricultural to an embryonic capitalist economy. Professor Hill have given us his take on some previously understudied and misunderstood notions, many that have not made the conventional history books. I note that he used as his endpoint John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” a work later adapted for the stage by Bertolt Brecht, and that I have reviewed elsewhere in this space (see September 2007 archives). One of the points discussed in that review is whether the figure of one MacHealth, the central figure of the work, former imperial soldier and leader of a profitable criminal gang is an incipient capitalist or the relic of an earlier age. Professor Hill’s book would seem to provide ammunition for the proposition that Mac Health, like the legendary Robin Hood, was a representative figure of the ‘freedom’ from the imperatives of capitalist contract, routine and law and harked back to the values of the old pastoral society. Read the book and see what you conclude.