The English Revolution of 1642-60 produced an explosion of stylistically and ideologically diverse pamphlet literature. The essays collected here focus on the prose of this new revolutionary era, and the new public sphere it helped to create. They cover a wide range of topics including the Royalist attack on the Sectarian Babel and the street theatre of the Ranters.

The English Revolution of 1642-60 produced an explosion of stylistically and ideologically diverse pamphlet literature. The essays collected here focus on the prose of this new revolutionary era, and the new public sphere it helped to create. They cover a wide range of topics including the Royalist attack on the Sectarian Babel and the street theatre of the Ranters.

In this volume, Holstun reconstructs five radical projects of 17th-century England in a development of Marxist history from below. Referencing the biblical story of Ehud who, with the words I have a message from God unto thee took a dagger and thrust it into the belly of the tyrannical ruler Eglon, so delivering the Israelites from 18 years of tyranny, Holstun examines the political and poetic furore surrounding John Felton, assassin of the Duke of Buckinghamshire and republican cause celebre. Turning his attention on the Revolution proper, he focuses on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby; and the agrarian communist diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of 17th-century England.