Politics and Religion, Community and Modernity: David Underdown in the Historiography of English Puritanism

This essay argues for “political puritanism” as a unifying theme in Underdown's work, indebted to the ideas of Christopher Hill and Michael Walzer, among others, but original in its role in Underdown's narrative of England's political culture and political transformation during the Revolution of 1648/1649. This evolving idea of “political puritanism” also makes sense of Underdown's studies of “popular politics” following Pride's Purge (1971) and makes it possible to analyze a consistent interest in problems of political ideology, from his early work on royalism to his Ford Lectures on “national politics.” A concluding section briefly considers the implications of some important recent work for Underdown's historiographic achievement.