Healey’s book is refreshing for its energetic writing, engaging wit and sound foundation in recent historical scholarship. It is light on analysis, but rich with anecdotes and explanations. Narrative sketches take precedence over probing of causes and consequences. Rather than advancing a new interpretation, Healey captures the vitality and turbulence of 17th-century England in an effective retelling, with many more players than the typical cast of kings and queens ... While narrating this tempestuous past, Healey has an eye on the present. He regards key stages in the political and intellectual history of revolutionary England as 'steps on a longer journey' toward modern democracy. Belief in such a trajectory used to be called 'Whiggish.' This readable and informative overview evokes a lost world which, for better or worse, 'was blazing a path toward our own.'
The point of Jonathan Healey’s new book...is to acknowledge all the complexities of the episode but still to see it as a real revolution of political thought—to recapture a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible. Such an account, as Healey recognizes, confronts formidable difficulties ... He writes with pace and fire and an unusually sharp sense of character and humor ... With the eclectic, wide-angle vision of the new social history, Healey shows that ideas and attitudes, rhetoric and revelations, rising from the ground up, can drive social transformation.
Convincing ... A clearsighted narrative of 17th-century England, deftly integrating original and insightful analysis of underlying social phenomena and expressing his enthusiasm in brisk, wryly humorous and occasionally bawdy prose ... Embraces episodes of high drama equal to any associated with the Tudors. There are conspiracies, battles and executions aplenty, plus apocalyptic scourges of pestilence and fire in 1665-66.
In lucid, often mischievous prose, Healey outlines the ideas and events that sent the state into constitutional cartwheels after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 ... Healey is excellent on the culture wars that made eyes swivel over such issues as sports on Sunday and decorations in church ... His judgments are sound and based on impressive research ... This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of 17th-century life.
Finally, we now have a rich understanding of economic and social history, urbanization and urban culture, the growth of trade, the origins of empire and the history of gender ... Against this daunting background Jonathan Healey’s book is an impressive achievement. It focuses on the English political crises, setting them in an up-to-date social, intellectual and cultural context. Healey’s spare but engaging narrative is brought to life at every stage with individual experiences ... Perhaps Jonathan Healey’s book is a sign of shift of emphasis, of the beginnings of a return to a more explicit interest in the significance of that century for ours.
Healey’s prose is precise but colloquial. He presents complex arguments, but delivers them in a laid back, often jocular manner. The style matches his inclusive choice of subject matter ... He tackles big subjects – religious dissent, the legal system – but hitches them to piquant stories about individuals previously unknown to history ... His storytelling lights up most vividly when he is writing about radicals and visionaries ... Compendious and lucid, The Blazing World is an engaging addition to the historical literature on the period.
I found its historical context about events leading up to the conflict far more interesting than its chronicling of battles and military leaders ... Covers an entire century and spotlights countless people, places, and events. At times, it was difficult to keep track of all the different actors, especially as political factions and religious sects adapted and re-created themselves during volatile periods. Even so, the march of progress — in the form of more elaborate economies and a decline in violent crime and equally violent punishment — runs through the book like a thread of hope.
Insightful ... As foreign as that lace-collared and buckle-shoed period of antique history may seem to us, we’re still very much in that moment, even as it passes.
Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, offers an ambitious narrative stuffed with engaging detail about the social and political developments that led to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, restoration, and shift to a constitutional monarchy ... Healey ably chronicles the suspenseful buildup to the shocking regicide of 1649 ... An educative history and fresh civics lesson for a new generation.
Healey’s elegant narrative provides a sure guide through the century’s labyrinthine political intrigues while analyzing deeper social dynamics that he crystallizes in dramatic scenes of hierarchies being suddenly upended ... The result is a bracing history of a time and place that created the modern world.
