Decorum Personae: The World Turned Upside Down and the Praise of Folly

Abstract

It can be argued that Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972) has had a greater impact on English than on History as a discipline by making material that was previously presumed “nonliterary” part of the mainstream study of literary scholars and students. This achievement looks set to be enduring. Yet Hill's representation of radical writing as by definition an authentic record of the voice of the “people” – those with little or no classical education or contact with intellectual traditions – is misleading, and has diminished our sense of the complexity of radical prose. The second half of this article offers a case study of an Oxford-educated radical who figures prominently in The World Turned Upside Down, the antinomian Henry Pinnell, and demonstrates how his polemical writing invokes the sophisticated Erasmian tradition of “Christian folly,” particularly as that tradition was channeled through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–1638).