This brilliant study of seventeenth-century English radicalism, published in Oxford University Press's prestigious English Monographs series, shows how the radicalism of the Levellers Richard Overton and William Walwyn, the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, and the Quaker Samuel Fisher developed out of elite cultural traditions. This close textual analysis of the reading and rhetoric of these prominent radicals shows that they used their “knowledge of learned culture and their experience of institutional education to expose those systems and structures of power” (9). Though they were indeed part of a movement categorized as the voice of the inarticulate and uneducated, these men were far from unlearned and incoherent. Nicholas McDowell demonstrates what he usefully terms a “ludic” (playful) element in their debate; they authenticated the “stereotype of the heretic as ignoramus while simultaneously undermining it through a display of their learning” (27). Their own strategic rhetoric, reinforced by the caricatures of contemporary critics like Thomas Edwards, should therefore not be mistaken for sociological or cultural reality. Overton, a Queens’ College scholar, drew on the Renaissance humanism of his Cambridge years. The London silk merchant Walwyn was influenced by both classical and continental texts; his citations included Plutarch, Seneca, and Lucian, as well as Charron and Montaigne. Coppe, a Merton College man, parodied a well-known work of Latin Grammar, toyed with the language and imagery of Juvenal and Seneca, and demonstrated some knowledge of Hebrew. Fisher's Oxford education was proclaimed in his Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and by much else. These were men who moved with ease in the learned environment of debate and disputation, and who applied such discourse to their radicalism in ways that, until the work of McDowell, have been insufficiently appreciated.

The English Radical Imagination is an exemplary study of the educational and intellectual lineages, influences, and techniques of early modern radicalism. In fact it makes some of the earlier histories of the radicals seem somewhat unsophisticated in analysis and approach. This, in itself, more than establishes its importance as a work of literary and cultural history. But does it go beyond this? The book's introduction and dust jacket certainly claim much more, promising a rewriting of “critical orthodoxy” about the religious radicals of the English Revolution. The most identifiable historiographical target is a corpus of work in the 1970s and 1980s primarily associated with Christopher Hill's famous book, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). McDowell's argument, expressed with less care than in the textual analysis of his main chapters (the late Hill would have been somewhat mystified by the implication that he was unaware that radicalism arose as a reaction to Calvinism), is that the existence of these learned radicals demonstrates the diversity of radicalism and undermines the famous Marxist historian's argument “for a lower-class heretical culture” (2–3). Some may argue that if McDowell cannot exactly be accused of hammering on an open door, the building around and behind the door has long been abandoned. Much of his criticized scholarship is two decades old. Academic fashions come and go, and interest in radicalism fell out of vogue. However, this assessment would not entirely be fair; McDowell's critique includes more recent literary experts who have built on the earlier historiography without sufficiently questioning its assumptions.

It would have been impossible for McDowell to have read David Como's new work on the prehistory of pre-1640s radicalism (Blown by the Spirit [2004]). But it is a pity that he also seems unaware of Peter Lake's The Boxmaker's Revenge (2001), for it deals with the intricacies and dynamism of religious interaction in early seventeenth-century London, linking the 1620s and 1630s with the radicalism of the 1640s in a way that provides another dimension to McDowell's rather rigid dichotomy between the intellectual radicalism of his subjects and Hill's uneducated lower-class heretics. Moreover, readers of McDowell's book need to remind themselves that although he could have included other learned and socially elevated radicals, he is essentially dealing with a small group of writers. Fisher, for example, was only one of scores of Quaker authors. It would be unfortunate if one (already acknowledged) learned radical was used to characterize the radicalism of a religious movement comprising many less-educated and socially select authors. Readers should also note that these pamphleteers included the women so glaringly absent from McDowell's selection—though that is another story.