A decade ago, Jason Peacey's Politicians and Pamphleteers explored the print revolution of the 1640s from the perspective of the politicians learning to exploit it. Peacey's excellent new book provides a rich, complementary counterpoint to his earlier study, focusing on the role of print in the revolutionary expansion of popular political participation. Like Politicians and Pamphleteers, Print and Public Politics is based on a staggering quantity of sophisticated research. Peacey has not only worked through the mountains of printed texts well known to historians of the revolution but has also identified numerous little-known “private” publications scattered in collections unmapped by the bibliographers. And he has contextualized this printed material with evidence from many manuscript archives, making brilliant use of sources as varied as library lists, seditious words cases, gentry correspondence, family papers, diaries, commonplace books, account books, booksellers' bills, corporation records, legal records, and more. This formidable research provides the basis for compelling arguments about print's role in the transformation of participatory politics. Peacey argues that cheap political print became ubiquitous in the 1640s, leading to the “democratization” of hitherto “privileged information” about Parliament (17). This democratization of information encouraged the popular appropriation of print as a tool of participatory politics, which in turn fostered the articulation of new (and still relevant) ideas about political transparency and accountability.

Peacey begins by reconstructing the circulation and consumption of cheap print in London and the provinces. He maps, in often revelatory detail, the networks of print distribution, the nature of the book business, and the continuing importance of noncommercial modes of textual transmission. Political print, he argues, “penetrated the country and across the social spectrum” leading to “the emergence of a national news and information culture” (88). Peacey then problematizes the reception and appropriation of this political print, reconstructing the spaces and modes of political reading, and tracing the emergence of “coping strategies” which enabled readers to exercise a pragmatic skepticism in the face of an often bewildering profusion of tracts, newsbooks, and broadsides.

Peacey then turns to the “public face of Parliament” in the 1640s and 1650s, and to the ways that print opened up parliamentary procedure and politics to critical public scrutiny; here was a “democratization of political awareness and understanding,” he argues, that would provide the basis for “participating in political life in an active rather than passive manner” (130). Peacey explores how print reportage shaped popular perceptions of parliamentary factions and corruption, and analyses how print enhanced the transparency of parliamentary procedures, making public the names of MPs as well as schedules of debates and committee meetings. For the most part, invocations of secrecy notwithstanding, MPs colluded in this process; as long as public access remained orderly, most MPs felt that “public interest needed to be managed rather than stifled” (183). By the 1650s, a regulated, routinized culture of parliamentary transparency was in place; the print reporting of speeches and debates, once prevalent in the 1640s, was now curtailed, but other innovations remained. This heightened public access to parliamentary information not only enabled greater participation, Peacey claims, but also prompted a “rethinking [of] the relationship between politicians and the public, and [the] reconceptualising [of] the nature of representation and accountability” (224–25). MPs now had to live in a world in which their actions were subject to public scrutiny and rebuke.

Peacey's final chapters explore the types of participatory politics that the print revolution enabled, focusing particularly on the tactically sophisticated culture of petitioning, lobbying, and protest. The costs of printing a text were relatively low, allowing more individuals to use print to participate in the political process. This is most evident in the growing use of “discrete” printed texts, produced for restricted circulation, to petition or lobby Parliament. But access to the process did not guarantee results, and Peacey demonstrates that repeated frustrations could push individuals into a “tactical escalation,” a turning away from discrete to public and commercial printing, and from deferential engagement to angry, sometimes radical critique of a systemically corrupt institution. Print also became a “tactical device” for the mobilization of protesting crowds. Ordinary citizens learned from Parliament how to use print to mobilize opinion and action, and from early 1642, printed texts were used to mobilize the London crowds that would cause such turmoil during the crises over war policy in 1643 and settlement in 1647–48.

Peacey's focus on participatory politics allows him to draw intriguing conclusions about the revolution's long-term impact. He argues that the Restored monarchy's attempts to “restrict public debate were not necessarily matched by efforts to curtail political participation” (403–4). Demand for news (even for defanged official newspapers) remained high, and private printed petitions and lobby-texts proliferated. These “developments in everyday participatory practices,” he concludes, “represented one of the most powerful legacies of the English Revolution” (413).

Students of print media, the English Revolution, and democratic political culture will all have to take stock of this marvelous book. More focused case studies will undoubtedly complicate Peacey's broader claims, and skeptics will question just how far down into the social hierarchy the “democratization” of knowledge and participatory practice actually went, but Peacey has made a highly compelling case. He has also pushed historians towards some useful rethinking of the shape of early modern political history. His claims for the emergence of a “common politics,” an integrated political culture in which men and women of all statuses and regions could participate (though not to the same extent), pushes productively against paradigms that focus on the elite/popular or central/local divide. His approach to the history of ideas is equally provocative, asking us to explore the genesis of radical thought in the experience of participatory politics. And his work raises provocative questions about the long-term origins of England's revolutionary transformations. To what extent were the dynamic political media system and participatory politics of early Stuart England not simply a prerevolutionary backdrop, but a protorevolutionary matrix for what followed? As we begin to better understand the nature of the English Revolution, we can begin to think anew about its long-term cultural origins.