The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England
Jonathan Healey
(Bloomsbury, £30)
JONATHAN HEALEY begins his compulsive narrative history on St James’s Day in 1604 at Cartmel Priory in Cumbria, with a riotous, cross-dressing mock wedding, a satirical skit or ‘skimmington’, aimed at Protestantism. His book teems with such details, culled assiduously from archives, which provide a chorus for the social upheavals of a turbulent, revolutionary age.
His cast of characters, together with their stories, enlivens what might have been a dry academic study. Take the lively religious discussion that took place in John Harris’s Bridgwater alehouse on a winter’s night in 1620—‘I hope we shall see these papists driven out of England, or hanged up’—when ‘the smell of woodsmoke scented the crisp air of the Somerset coast, accompanied by the clattering percussion of the masts from the town’s dock’. These evocative descriptions bring immediacy to the tortuous and often unfathomable religious, cultural and
