Ted Vallance on 'The importance of radicalism in the 1640s'

 23rd October, 2024

The second of the two talks that appeared on The World Turned Upside Down website last Friday was by Ted Vallance of the University of Roehampton. He addressed the issue of  'The importance of radicalism in the 1640s', the text of which can be found here , and the associated question of how historians' perceptions have changed in recent decades. Recent work has suggested that such radical groups existed but did not possess a fixed identity or ideology. They were fluid groups interacting with other groups but did have direct and indirect influence in the period he was discussing. I have to say that found his analysis exceptionally challenging and interesting. It was never helpful to view the Levellers, for example, as the precursors of nineteenth and twentieth-century Socialists or Communists. The creation of intellectual and political genealogies of the kind sometimes favoured by early modern figures or by later historians like Christopher Hill was not convincing. (Michael Braddick's forthcoming book on Hill may throw some light on this issue.) Overall, the talk made me think and think again: it made me revise my views and consider how I might take forward this process of personal revision.