The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603–1689JonathanHealey. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. 492 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780593318355. $38.00 (cloth).

Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603–1689 seeks to square the circle of providing a succinct history of seventeenth-century England that is accessible to the non-specialist reader but does not dumb down the complexities of this century of multiple revolutions. The title of Healey's book, a reference to Lady Margaret Cavendish's 1666 prose fantasy of the discovery of a new world embarking on an age of imperial and scientific conquest, serves as one of Healey's guiding metaphors for seventeenth-century England as a whole. Healey also regularly returns to the metaphorical figure of the skimmington, the early modern rural ritual of inversion, where country people mocked those who were thought to have offended the moral order, to guide his narrative. Used together, these metaphors capture Healey's central thesis: that seventeenth-century England was a chaotic, often topsy-turvy world that presaged a number of possible routes to modernity, some taken, some rejected. While Healey's book is aimed at the general reader, it attempts to synthesize a number of strands in recent historiography. Healey, a social historian by training and trade, draws on the work of Keith Wrightson, Jim Sharpe, and Steve Hindle with their careful attention to the societal and local for his background. His exploration of politics is clearly influenced by non- or post-revisionist writers such as Ann Hughes, Clive Holmes, Tim Harris, and especially Austin Woolrych, although the influence of John Adamson's exploration of the aristocratic politicking in the period is also clearly evident. Healey's use of these historiographic influences produces a synthesis that feels fresh and up-to-date. The book begins in 1604 with a disorderly prank staged by a group of Catholic local youth in the village church of Cartmel in North Lancashire (now Cumbria), a complaint against Protestantism and, indirectly, James I, the new Calvinist king from Scotland. This performative lament for lost certainties, Healey recognizes, was in the long tradition of the skimmington, and aimed to reset a world turned upside down by the English Reformation of the Tudor century. As is clear to those looking back with the benefit of hindsight, any hope for a return to the traditional medieval order would be repeatedly dashed as the century progressed. Healey sets the scene of the early seventeenth century, dealing with religious tensions such as that of the Catholic gunpowder plot and the social and potentially divisive effects of Puritanism. One theme of Healey's narrative concerns the changing character of English society in the early Stuart period. In line with those social historians who have focused on the language of “sorts” of persons, derived from Sir Thomas Smith's 1583 De Republica Anglorum rather than from anachronistic notions of “class,” Healey carefully avoids a determinist “rise of the middle classes” thesis, while highlighting the impact of social and economic changes that England was undergoing in this period. Healey links his analysis of the middling sort in early Stuart England to the culture of Puritanism, which he sees as central to the question of the causes and outbreak of the English Civil Wars in the face of the Charles I and Archbishop William Laud's innovations in the Church of England. In discussing this issue, Healey blends the high political approach characteristic of John Adamson's work with the socially and culturally driven studies of historians such as Ann Hughes and Diane Purkiss, providing the reader with a clear sense of the interconnected nature of the pre-Civil Wars politics. The middle chapters of the book focus on the radicalism of the mid-seventeenth century crisis, surveying the arguments of radicals from the New Model Army, the Levellers, and the Diggers to the Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. While avoiding the temptation to list (to paraphrase Arnold Toynbee) “one damn sect after another,” Healey ponders whether the radicalism of the Civil Wars and post-Pride's Purge revolutions in government could have produced an early democratic or republican settlement for England. He comes down firmly against Cromwellian rule, considering that Oliver's Puritanism and stolidly conservative instincts had the effect of negativing any viable discussion of republicanism in England for a long time after the fall of his Protectorate. Healey further ponders as a counterfactual whether the democratic or republican potential of the Revolution could have been saved if other New Model Army commanders such as Thomas Rainsborough or John Lambert had come to the political fore rather than Cromwell. In this regard, Healey regrets the loss to English political and constitutional history caused by Lambert's falling out with Cromwell in 1657 and thus his viability as a successor, seeing in Lambert a far more dynamic mind than Oliver's son Richard. With the fall of the English Free State in 1660 and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Healey focuses on the key points of Restoration Stuart politics: the revanchist Cavalierism of Charles II's early rule, the fatal conspiracy theories and prejudices behind the Popish Plot, and the campaign to exclude the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne. Joining this political narrative are the two themes of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World: the emergence of a commercially driven empire and new world of scientific discovery. Following Healey's stress on radicalism in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the heroes of the Restoration period are the old Cromwellian moderate Anthony Ashley Cooper, now Lord Shaftesbury, and his philosopher secretary John Locke as well as the long-lived Leveller John Wildman. Changes among the common people are not forgotten, with Healey noting societal changes, such as the increasing reticence of jurors to enter guilty verdicts for trivial crimes that still carried the death penalty. The Blazing World is an accessible and well written bird's eye view of the history of English politics and society during the seventeenth century. It covers the century without being whiggish in telling its story, and the reader gets a firm sense of the rapidly changing world and the possibilities that the century raised. The Blazing World provides a readable, broad, and up-to-date introduction to a complicated historical period.