Reviving the Radicals: Clement Writer and the Historiography of the English Revolution

• Published in: Prose studies Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 243 - 255
• Main Author: Peacey, Jason
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.09.2014
• Subjects: citizenship; parliament; petitioning; political participation; print culture; radicalism
• ISSN: 0144-0357; 1743-9426
• DOI: 10.1080/01440357.2014.994736

This article seeks to recover civil war radicalism as a fit subject for scholarly enquiry, in the wake of "revisionist" responses to the work of Christopher Hill that challenged the validity of concentrating upon "marginal" figures, and upon aspects of the revolutionary decades that were merely "epiphenomenal." It does so by drawing attention to one particular individual - Clement Writer - who played a significant part in Hill's work, although it does so by highlighting something other than his ideas, or even his status as a humble and uneducated clothier. My focus, therefore, is less upon Writer's religious radicalism than upon his participatory practices, and his appropriation of print as a tactical device; upon the part that experience of political processes played in his radicalization; and upon evidence of what might be described as his "political imaginary," or his less-than-fully-theorized understanding of the political system, its faults and its possibilities.