Healey charts this extraordinary course from the Tudors to the Hanoverians in The Blazing World , which offers “a new history of revolutionary England ”.

The Blazing World successfully captures the sheer excitement and possibilities of what was, or could have been, and is a great place to start.

But so are people who do not fit neatly into tales of a rising merchant class and revanchist feudalists. Over two paragraphs, a series of casual connections are made connecting economic change to a more widespread belief in common law civil liberties: as economic growth outpaced the growth of the money supply, credit became more commonplace; that resulted in greater litigation in relation to unpaid debt, and that 'in a culture so saturated with lawyers and litigants, legal ideas inevitably seeped into politics', including ideas about civil liberties. However, constitutional niceties clearly weren't the primary motivator for all participants in the Civil War: Cromwell, for example, described constitutions as mere 'dross and dung' in comparison with Christ.

The Empress reconnects with the spirits and asks if one of them can come serve as a scribe to help with her Cabbala. Unlike Clare Jackson's book, with its focuses on politics and foreign affairs, the Blazing World is broader in its approach: at its core is still a relatively standard narrative history of the key political and military events; but this is interspersed with analysis of English society and economics which gives a good sense of what England was like at the time and how that impacted on politics. Nevertheless, Healey does successfully capture the religious diversity and intellectual creativity of what remains as England’s only republican experiment.If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The European absolutism sought by the Stuarts would not take root in England, which became, as Healey emphasises, a place where politics was “no longer about monarchs”. The Rump Parliament (1649-1653) dealt with its domestic and foreign threats with relative success and the establishment of the Cromwellian Protectorate in December 1653 seemed to have brought about some much-needed political stability. When the civil war began in 1642, nobody thought it would lead to the decapitation of a king and advent of a republic (albeit a short-lived one).

Thus, Cavendish’s experience as a wealthy Royalist during the English Civil War is an important motivating factor behind her impassioned defense of absolute monarchy and deep fear of political factions in The Blazing World. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.This may be surprising; we associate the rise of the pamphlet and the newspaper with a later era, the Enlightenment. When one narrates such a century with concision, bold statements are necessary and Healey can be forgiven those occasions when he misses his mark. There were no penalties compelling people to any particular faith, instead an exhortation that “endeavours be used to win them by sound doctrine and the example of good conversation ”. She published most of her work between 1662 and 1668, and she always insisted on publishing her books in her own name, which was extremely unusual in the 17th century.

Starting with the seeds of one revolution and ending with a second, the period teems with ideas about what it means to be a citizen as opposed to a subject, and about how God should be worshipped. Both Clare Jackson and Jonathan Healey avoid the temptation to be too heavy handed with drawing modern parallels, but the subtext is clear – Britain may feel like a mess now, but we've been here before (in the case of the seventeenth century, with a relatively happy ending). Intransigent parliaments were unwilling to provide necessary financial supply, and sought to curtail the monarch’s absolutist tendencies. She is as unusual to the Blazing World’s inhabitants as they are to her, so they bring her to their Emperor, who lives in a palace in the gold-and-jewel-studded city of Paradise.With the levying of taxes to pay for a war to enforce religious conformities already under debate, the stage was set for conflict. And these political and religious ideas would emerge from across the social spectrum, including those usually excluded from formal politics. This, in the end, is perhaps the greatest aspect of his approach to this blazing world: not to judge or patronise it, nor force its figures to fit the preoccupations or assumptions of the present, but instead to respect and seek to understand it.