Studies of the English civil war in the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by the Marxist concept of class struggle. The centre stage was occupied by Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers, Ranters and other ‘radicals’. Since then revisionism has replaced the conflict of classes with religious disputes and rather marginalised radicalism. Of late there are signs of a revived interest in those who sought to turn the world upside down, of which this book is one of the more significant. Some revisionists have questioned the use of the very words radical and radicalism in a seventeenth-century context, claiming that they are anachronistic since they entered the political vocabulary later. This nominalism is explored by the editors in the introduction. They conclude that ‘we may not be able to define early modern radicalism, but we know it when we see it’! Certainly we can recognise it in the other contributions to the volume. Nicholas McDowell explores the connexions between Richard Crashaw's Arminianism and John Saltmarsh's Antinomianism, showing that radicalism had an elite as well as a popular constituency, with a base in prewar Cambridge. The university provides the background for Sarah Hutton's ‘radical review of the Cambridge Platonists’ in which she seeks to replace the view that they were mystics unconcerned with worldly affairs with one which sees them as political radicals. Jason Peacy even postulates a radical royalism in his essay, which is mainly a study of Sir Roger Twysden. Mario Caricchio investigates the career of the bookseller Giles Calvert, whose shop at the Black Spread Eagle was a centre for the sale of radical literature. Most contributors challenge the old Marxist notion of a ‘radical tradition’ from the Lollards to the Chartists. Ariel Hessayon challenges them by placing Gerald Winstanley in a context that connects him with John Wycliffe. Noam Flinker uses the rabbinic concept of Midrash to analyse the writings of Abiezer Coppe. Jim Smyth sees ‘Cromwellian expansion as republican imperialism’. Stefano Villani investigates Italian reactions to English radicals, which were all from a conservative Catholic perspective and therefore viewed them as misguided eccentrics. The later essays, Warren Johnston's on ‘apocalyptical ideas in late seventeenth-century England’, Sandra Hynes on ‘Letters from Joseph Boyes to Ralph Thoresby, 1680–1710’ and Giovanni Tarantino on Anthony Collins, go beyond the revolutionary period, while Jason McElligott on William Hone (1780–1842) even goes beyond the period indicated in the title of the book. While they show that mid seventeenth-century radicalism survived the Restoration, and was even revived in the late eighteenth century, they scarcely succeed in making it centre stage again. The editors pose the question why, if radicals were so significant in the decades 1640–60, did the Restoration occur? Rereading the views which they expressed led this reviewer to the perhaps superficial conclusion that the majority of Englishmen became weary of a generation of vipers who inflicted their grotesque beliefs on them and determined never to give them another chance.