Volume 5, Number 2 · August 26, 1965
England's Revolution
By Lawrence Stone
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
by Christopher Hill
Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 333 pp., $7.50
Over the last nine years Mr. Hill has published no fewer than five major works dealing with the social and ideological origins of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century.[*] This torrential scholarly output is the fruit of years of dedicated research into the printed literature, and also, one may surmise, a consequence of the emotional and intellectual sense of release produced by his clean break with the Communist Party. As a result, the age of the Puritan Revolution must now be regarded as 'Hill's half-century,' and for years to come students will be testing, confirming, modifying, or rejecting his hypotheses. It is given to few historians to achieve such intellectual dominance over their chosen field, for it requires sustained capacity for taking pains in the drudgery of research, a fertile and facile pen, and tremendous imaginative powers. Together, these are the marks of the great historian.
Review, 2889 words
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