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Born in Leeds in 1982, Jonathan Healey is a historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He writes history from the bottom up, focusing on ordinary people - their lives, loves, culture and politics. He is Associate Professor in Social History at the University of Oxford. In 2012 he was picked as one of the winners of BBC Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers Competition.
A colourful history of the Stuart age . . . This lively and mischievous book guides us through a dangerous revolutionary century ... There's a reticence about taking on such a complex and turbulent period, but the rewards, as The Blazing World manifestly demonstrates, are very great . . . This is a wonderful book, exhaustively researched, vigorously argued and teeming with the furious joy of 17th-century life -- Jessie Childs * The Times * Healey's prose is precise but colloquial. He presents complex arguments, but delivers them in a laid back, often jocular manner . . . He tackles big subjects - religious dissent, the legal system - but hitches them to piquant stories about individuals previously unknown to history . . . Events were tumultuous, but Healey persuasively shows us that thoughts were as thrilling and sometimes as wild . . . Compendious and lucid -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * Spectator * [A] lively, compelling and combative study of the most dramatic and consequential century in English history ... The Blazing World offers a thrilling panorama of the period, from perspectives high and low, told with a winning combination of impish wit, sound judgment, and serious scholarship ... It will delight those new to its extraordinary age, and fire up its grizzled veterans * Telegraph * In his wide-ranging new history of revolutionary England, Jonathan Healey has given us a masterly account of a period that urgently needs to be reclaimed and recognised for its importance and interest . . . Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Blazing World is that rare achievement - a window into the past that is at once profoundly different and yet startlingly familiar. It deserves every success -- Dr Linda Porter * Writing Desk * The Blazing World tells the story of that crucible era when Englishmen began to think. About God and government, how to limit the monarchy and how 'the poorest he' (if not the poorest she) might share in some kind of democracy. Jonathan Healey explains Revolutionary England with great insight and wit, and an objectivity usually lacking in histories written with an inclination towards one side or the other. The book helps us to understand how and why, 400 years ago, Englishmen came to develop political and religious beliefs for which they were prepared to die and would eventually amalgamate in a way which set Britain (and, ideologically) America on a path to greatness. -- Geoffrey Robertson KC, author of The Tyrannicide Brief An erudite but readable history of a remarkable century. Contemporary voices, unearthed from the archive, convey the texture of the times and bring events to life -- Dr Margarette Lincoln, author of London and the Seventeenth Century Here a familiar and very important story is told with exceptional clarity and vigour, and plenty of very unfamiliar anecdotes and characters, drawn from all over the nation and all of Stuart society -- Ronald Hutton The seventeenth century was the most dramatic and consequential in British history, the period during which the modern world was formed, and Jonathan Healey is as assured a guide to its twists and turns, its tragedies and triumphs as one could wish for. The Blazing World is a triumph of scholarship and concision -- Paul Lay, author of Providence Lost
