It’s a cliché to say that history repeats itself, especially since it often doesn’t. Oxford professor Jonathan Healey makes it clear in The Blazing World that the figures discussed within — Oliver Cromwell, William Laud, and the Stuart monarchs from James I to Charles II, among a cast of many more — could only have existed during their unique time. And yet, “The echoes of seventeenth-century England are still with us,” he writes, “in our society, in the built environment and in the very landscape.”
The similarities between those times and our own (on both sides of the Atlantic) are impossible to ignore. At the beginning of the 1600s, harvests were good, so England experienced a period of increased prosperity. Due to improving schools, literacy swelled and publications proliferated, creating a better-informed middle class. For perhaps the first time, those beneath the gentry engaged with new ideas and had the confidence to take their debates out of the taverns and into Parliament.
