Print and Radicalism in the British Civil Wars

My research project aims to explore the relationship between print and radicalism during and after the British civil wars. It will seek to use a microhistorical approach to uncover the role played by individual printers and publishers in facilitating and fostering the radical discourse of the civil war period, and prosopographical techniques to explore the extent to which these individuals were connected to wider radical social, religious and political networks. It will also aim to use typographical analysis to both identify previously anonymous textual sources and contextualise them within the context of a world being turned upside down.

In so doing, this project will seek to challenge the prevailing conceptual historiographical approach to radicalism in the civil war period; an approach which has sought to understand radicalism in terms of defined, discrete groups with clear, cohesive ideas and agendas. By recovering the realities of individual experience, however, and by more closely delineating the complex relationship between individuals and their ideas, I aim to complicate the Revisionist approach which has sought to separate the unstable dynamic of the radical civil war milieu into more soluble, if somewhat anachronistic, chunks. This project will seek to recover the fluidity of individuals, ideas and allegiances within the context of the precarious and uncertain reality of the civil war and interregnum period. This research will thus build on a growing body of post-revisionist scholarship which has sought to reorientate radicalism back towards the centre of the civil war period and reposition the conceptual basis for understanding it. David Como's Blown By the Spirit, for example, not only analysed the extent and impact of radical religious sentiment in antebellum London, but sought to understanding the religious underground in terms of "webs of association" rather than stable groups or political entities. Joel Halcomb's work has aimed to bring to the fore the internal personal mechanics of radical religious churches, whilst David Braddick's recent works have called for a much deeper analysis of the contexts in which radicalism flourished and the extent of its impact.

The source base for this project will primarily be textual, utilising the two vast collections of the Thomason Tracts and the William Clarke collection held at Worcester College, Oxford. Although these two collections are very well known, many of the pamphlets they contain are poorly understood, often disregarded or marginalised as simplistic propaganda. This project, however, will seek to more thoroughly analyse the internal mechanics of these sources, the ways they were produced, by whom, for whom, and to what end. A microhistorical approach will again be key in understanding the little-known printers and writers who produced these texts and the ways in which they were connected to broader political and religious factions in the civil war Britain. Such an analysis can offer a fresh perspective upon the historiography of the civil wars and the place of print and radicalism within it.