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Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2003. £72.00.
In a book clearly written for the academic or post-graduate student studying seventeenth-century radicalism McDowell makes it abundantly clear in the Preface that this book is intended to address long standing, deeply embedded assumptions concerning the nature of radicalism in the English revolution. His aim is to deconstruct what he claims are the influential, but rigid, distinctions between radical and popular culture that have become a part of the period's historiography through the work of the historian Christopher Hill. A bold challenge, as many historians of this period continue to reiterate Hill's argument in his seminal study The World Turned Upside Down (1972) that radical writing is synonymous with popular culture. Central to McDowell's argument is the claim that Hill too readily accepts at face value, 'from a positive and sympathetic Marxist perspective', the hostile claims of contemporary radical opponents concerning the inferior intellectual background of the radicals. Through a subtle blend of biographical material and literary interpretation McDowell succeeds in building a sustained and at times compelling argument that demonstrates the limitations of Hill's thesis. Central to McDowell's argument is an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and exploration of the pragmatic aims of some of the most influential writers commonly associated with both popular radical and elite conservative texts.
After an initial summary of his arguments in the first chapter McDowell discusses in chapter two the fallibility of placing too great a reliance upon the claims of such as Thomas Edwards, the Presbyterian minister who wrote Gangraena, that radicals were nothing...