ABSTRACT
Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution gives a comprehensive picture of radical Puritan ideas that sprang up during the English Revolution. Hill was intervening in a broad debate about the causes and nature of the English Civil Wars, traditionally understood to have been fought to settle the question of how much power should lie in the hands of the monarchy. Hill widens the subject by focusing on the relationship between the ideas of the Puritan radicals of the English Revolution and the social, economic, and political circumstances of the time, making a connection between the ideas of the time and what was actually going on. The revolution involved “the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters”.
