This book addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period as uneducated ‘tub preachers’. The book challenges the divide between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture in the 17th century, investigating how critics — especially those sympathetic to the radicals — have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists and publicists of radicalism as ‘illiterate Mechanick persons’. Whil ... More

This book addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period as uneducated ‘tub preachers’. The book challenges the divide between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture in the 17th century, investigating how critics — especially those sympathetic to the radicals — have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists and publicists of radicalism as ‘illiterate Mechanick persons’. While the rank and file of the more organized radical movements was composed of the lower ‘middling sort’ of people who had little or no access to the elite intellectual culture of the day, some of the most discussed radical writers had been to university in the 1620 and 1630s. The failure to recognize the elite cultural background of these writers has resulted in a failure to acknowledge the range of their intellectual and rhetorical resources and, consequently, in a misrepresentation of the sophistication of both their ideas and their writing. Case studies of some of the most innovative radicals show how these writers use their experience of an orthodox humanist education for the purposes of satire and ridicule and how they interpret texts associated with orthodox ideologies and cultural practices to produce heterodox arguments. Radical prose of the English Revolution thus emerges as a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the literary canon.