Alternative Worlds Imagined, 1500-1700

J. C. Davis is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His previous publications include Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981), Fear, Myth and History (1986), Oliver Cromwell (2001) and numerous essays on the history of utopian and radical thought. He is currently  co-editing Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought (2018) with John Morrow.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Radicalism in a traditional society: The valuation of radical thought in the English Commonwealth, 1649-1660.- 3. Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions.- 4. Conquering the Conquest: the limits of non-violence in Gerrard Winstanley’s thought’.- 5. Formal Utopia/Informal Millennium: the struggle between form and substance as a context for seventeenth-century utopianism.- 6. Against Formality: one aspect of the English Revolution.- 7. Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution.- 8. Thomas More’s Utopia: sources, legacy and interpretation.- 9. Goodbye to Utopia: Thomas More’s Utopian conclusion.- 10. James Harrington’s utopian radicalism and the narration of an alternative world.- 11. Conclusion.