The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England

Historian Jonathan Healey charts the turbulent course of the seventeenth century

The seventeenth century began as the English suddenly found themselves ruled by a Scotsman and ended in the shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, the country suffered terrorism and witch panics. Under his son Charles, state and society collapsed into civil war, to be followed by an army coup and regicide. For a short time - England was a republic. There were bitter struggles over faith and no boundaries to politics. In the coffee shops and alehouses of plague-ridden London, new ideas were forged that were angry, populist and almost impossible for monarchs to control.

From raw politics to religious divisions, civil wars to witch trials, plague to press freedoms, Jonathan Healey tells the story of a strange but fascinating century that forged a new world.

Jonathan Healey is a Fellow of Kellogg College and University Lecturer in English Local and Social History at the University of Oxford.

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