The Nature of the English Revolution

John Morrill's The Nature of the English Revolution is a scholarly collection of essays by a leading historian of seventeenth century Britain, arguing in particular for the importance of religious motivation, rather than purely political or class conflict, in driving the English Civil War and the broader upheaval of the period. Morrill's revisionist emphasis on religion was influential in shifting how historians weighted the war's causes, and the essays carry the authority of close primary-source work in parish and county records. As an argument within an ongoing historiographical debate rather than a settled consensus, Morrill's religious emphasis has itself been qualified and contested by other historians who weight social, economic and constitutional factors more heavily, and the book is best read as one major position within that continuing debate.