ABSTRACT
The year before The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution appeared, Christopher Hill’s student David Underdown published his own book on the revolution, Pride’s Purge. Hill wanted to underline how important class conflict had been in English history; the English Revolution affected every section of society, he thought, and had produced the potential to change society in a more dramatic way than people had considered. Many historians working at the same time as Hill wanted to concentrate on incidents and ideas that seemed to show how this evolution worked. Probably the most important influence on Hill’s work was the British historian Keith Thomas’s book Religion and the Decline of Magic, which set out to seriously investigate supernatural beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Thomas’s work highlighted the fact that what looked like strange or ridiculous beliefs were actually worthy of serious study.
