Fire From Heaven by David Underdown

Fire From Heaven by David Underdown

Two hundred years before Hardy disguised it as Casterbridge, Dorchester was a typical English county town, of middling size and unremarkable achievements. But on 6 August 1613 much of it was destroyed in a great conflagration, which its inhabitants regarded as a 'fire from heaven', the catalyst for the events described in this book. Over the next twenty years, a time of increasing political and religious turmoil all over Europe, Dorchester became the most religiously radical town in the kingdom. The tolerant, paternalist Elizabethan town oligarchy was quickly replaced by a group of men who had a vision of a godly community in which power was to be exercised according to religious commitment rather than wealth or rank. One of this book's most remarkable achievements is the re-creation, with an intimacy unique for an English community so distant from our own, of the lives of those who do not make it into history books. We glimpse the ordinary men and women of the town drinking and swearing, fornicating and repenting, triumphing over their neighbours or languishing in prison, striving to live up to the new ideals of their community or rejecting them with bitter anger and mocking laughter. In it subtle exploration of human motives and aspirations, in its brilliant and detailed reconstruction, this book shows how much of the past we can recover when in the hands of a master historian.

"Fascinating- a brilliant exercise in historical reconstruction', Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph

David Underdown is Professor of History at Yale University. He was born at Wells, Somerset, and educated at Wells Blue Coat School and Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of Revel, Riot and Rebellion (1985) and other books and articles on seventeenth-century English history.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780712609159
ISBN 10	0712609156
Title	Fire From Heaven
Author	David Underdown
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2003-04-03
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable