David R. Como

This project illuminates the origins and nature of the most radical species of parliamentarian political and religious agitation that appeared during the English civil war of the 1640s. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript and print sources, and exploiting digital technologies to unravel the world of civil war underground print, the study provides a new narrative of the civil-war period. In the process, it explores the emergence of many of the more strikingly novel intellectual currents of the times, offering, for instance, a new analysis of the origins of the Leveller agitation (by some accounts the first democratic political movement in post-classical western history). More generally, it explains how and why the English civil war mutated into a revolution.