Pulsating Panorama of a Complex Decade

https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down/dp/014199313...

As the book summary says:

"Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic—the ideology of the propertied class—there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success “might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.” In The World Turned Upside Down Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers, and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. "

It's an amazing look at the revolutions inside the revolution, the radicals who wanted to go beyond the radicalism of the moment.

But keep in mind, to go from a standard history to this history is like studying animals on land, and then deciding to study animals in the sea. You are stepping into a different world. Christopher Hill himself once remarked that when he compared his index to the indexes of the best known histories of the period, he noted how little overlap there was.

1. Very few people tuck very neatly into one historical ‘age’ or another” — one only has to trace the successful early careers of Restoration figures such as Pepys and Christopher Wren back into the 1650s to appreciate this

2. What may be a casual observation about other periods of history is of tremendous importance in understanding the Interregnum, which was consigned to official oblivion the moment the restored Charles II post-dated the start of his reign to his father’s death

3. Far from the dour, militaristic regimes of popular imagination, life under the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate emerges as innovative and exciting: the effect of the hitherto unimaginable act of abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords after years of transformative conflict being to unleash an energetic spirit of ambitious experimentation and industry

4. The complicated Civil Wars of the 1640s, and the 11 years of constitutional experiments that followed, have struggled to capture the attention of a wider public living happily on a diet of Hitler and the Tudors and content with Britain’s neat national story of kings and queens stretching along the schoolchild’s wooden ruler

5. But what is more striking is the strong current of forgiveness and future-proofing civility from all sides: the Parliamentarians were “remarkably unvindictive” in government, as was Charles II on his return