Most academic libraries will probably have multiple well-thumbed copies. I was still drawing on it for essays I wrote earlier this year. It was a staple of reading lists then, as it had been in the 1970s and 1980s and still is now. It was probably in about 1999, when I was doing a course on early modern politics in the first year of my undergraduate degree. The first book by Underdown I ever read was Pride’s Purge: politics in the Puritan Revolution. Here are three that have made a particularly big impact on me. I’ve got a few books by Underdown on my bookshelves, and over the years a number of them have been texts I’ve returned to again and again. There is a moving obituary by Mark Kishlansky over at the NACBS blog. Both scholars of seventeenth-century England and a more general audience will learn from and appreciate this study.I found out earlier in the week that David Underdown, the distinguished historian of seventeenth-century England, had died. David Underdown has produced a book that, while solidly researched and sophisticated in its analysis, is also elegantly and accessibly written. While he admits that the term itself is a modem abstraction, he argues that it also has important historical validity. Underdown's study substantially adds to the debate on the nature of Puritanism. This case study helps us to understand more about the underlying religious and social ruptures that led to the midcentury revolution. By focusing on the efforts for godly reformation in Dorchester, and the resistance of such efforts, Underdown uses Dorchester as a microcosm of the struggles of Puritanism in early Stuart and Civil War England. Yet this book is far more than a local history. This book offers a key into the mental world of some of the leading families of Dorchester.
The material and close reading of Dorchester's records are fascinating and give us insight into the lives of the forgotten people. Fire from Heaven is a case study of the west-county town of Dorchester, a proud and important community in the first half of the seventeenth century. David Underdown, one of the foremost scholars of seventeenth-century England, has produced major political studies, such as Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), and works that combined social history with political change, such as Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (New York, 1985).
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