The Edge of Revolution

Abstract

in england on edge David Cressy returns to the troubled historiographical waters of the English Civil War, even as he concedes that “enormous effort has gone into characterizing the English Revolution and anatomizing its origin” (p. 7). His choice of the word “Revolution” betrays his motive for revisiting this “blood-stained historiographical terrain”: his dissatisfaction both with revisionist historians who have insisted that nothing “earth-shattering took place in the seventeenth century, except perhaps the killing of the King” (p. 8), and with those scholars who, although they recognize an English revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, locate a “transformed political environment, profound constitutional upheaval, a shattered religious culture, and a spate of radical ideas” after 1642, “as if they were products or consequences of the civil war” (p. 8). England on Edge argues that