'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title. (July)Ĭopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. The book doesn't work as a general introduction, but readers who already know some of the history will find it full of colorful personalities and scenes and evocative period writings that bring to life the people, culture and violent turmoil of the age. Extending from 1639 to 1653 they later became known for historians convenience as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Fixated on trees rather than the forest, Purkiss offers no clear overview of events or much coherent interpretation of the conflict, aside from some facile psychoanalysis ('Charles I's longing to make the monarchy independent of any hurtful criticism proceeded from the bullied child he was'). English civil war is also a misnomer, it was actually a series of British and Irish civil wars, with separate but linked campaigns in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland over quite a lengthy period. And she interweaves an avowedly disjointed, episodic kings-and-battles narrative of military campaigns and political maneuverings, replete with dramatic eyewitness accounts. She also slathers on plenty of social history, digressing on everything from contemporary housing to cookbooks. Oxford historian Purkiss ( The Witch in History) draws a gallery of sharp biographical sketches of participants from Cromwell to ordinary soldiers, paying special attention to the oft-neglected doings of women, like aristocratic intriguer Lucy Hay and radical dissenter Anna Trapnel. As a contemporary pamphlet tells it, some soldiers searching. There are many ways to approach the history of the 17th-century upheaval that beheaded a king and laid the foundations for democratic revolutions to come, and this absorbing, ungainly study tries them all. Desire and Its Deformities: Fantasies of Witchcraft in the English Civil War.

The English Civil War by Diane Purkiss