The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries - Tapa blanda

-Intensely interesting ... Essential.- --Perez Zagorin, Journal of Modern History -The commanding interpreter of seventeenth-century England ... No historian of recent times was so synonymous with his period of study; he is the reason why most of us know anything about the seventeenth century at all.- --Guardian -The dean and paragon of English historians.- --E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class -He established the concept of an 'English Revolution' every bit as significant and potentially as radical as its French and Russian equivalents ... Wide-ranging, popular and immensely prolific ... the dominant figure in studies of the period.- --Telegraph -A book I argued with from beginning to end, and I was sometimes overborne by its arguments. It is also, in an old-fashioned phrase, a book of great learning. Both these observations constitute high praise.- --John Morrill, History Today "Intensely interesting ... Essential." --Perez Zagorin, Journal of Modern History "The commanding interpreter of seventeenth-century England ... No historian of recent times was so synonymous with his period of study; he is the reason why most of us know anything about the seventeenth century at all." --Guardian "The dean and paragon of English historians." --E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class "He established the concept of an 'English Revolution' every bit as significant and potentially as radical as its French and Russian equivalents ... Wide-ranging, popular and immensely prolific ... the dominant figure in studies of the period." --Telegraph "A book I argued with from beginning to end, and I was sometimes overborne by its arguments. It is also, in an old-fashioned phrase, a book of great learning. Both these observations constitute high praise." --John Morrill, History Today

The failure of the English Revolution in 1660 provoked a variety of responses among radical clergy, intellectuals and writers, as they struggled to accept and account for their defeat in the light of divine providence. Christopher Hill's close analysis of the writings of the Levellers and Diggers, of Fox and other important early Quakers suggests that the revolutionary beliefs and savage social judgments and disillusionments that Milton expressed in his writings at the time were shared by many of his contemporaries. Hill makes a provocative case, as well, that Milton's three great poems-Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes-came directly out of his painful reassessment of man and his society, and of society's relation to moral order.