Christopher Hill is perhaps the only historian of seventeenth-century England to retain a popular readership over the last fifty years. Nor is anyone currently living likely to match that accomplishment.

Hill’s most famous book was The World Turned Upside Down, first published in 1972. It focused on the Interregnum, the period between the ouster of Charles I, who was subsequently executed, and the monarchist Restoration of 1660.

Yet Hill’s chosen subjects were not the elite reformers who anticipated the liberal, bourgeois, and parliamentary England that eventually prevailed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Instead, he concentrated on vanquished radicals: freethinkers who denied scriptural revelation, Levellers who urged a broad electoral franchise, Diggers who tried to implement primitive communism, and ecstatic Ranters who delivered shocking prophecies, sometimes in the nude.