The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 12; p. 122
• Main Author: Robinson, Jon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2006
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English language; English literature; Religion
• ISSN: 0954-0970

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. 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. McDowell's exploration of biographical details, rhetorical strategies, the contradictory construction of polemical identity and radical self-representation, is compelling, his argument on the whole convincing, but he does not altogether succeed in convincingly deconstructing Christopher Hill's argument that radicalism was a phenomenon of popular culture distinct from elite culture.