Ehud's Dagger

In this meticulously researched, award-winning book, James Holstun details seventeenth-century England’s first capitalist revolution, and its first anti-capitalist revolutions, in a stirring project of Marxist history from below.“This remarkable book offers both a passionate engagement with the concrete processes of political struggle in the English Revolution and a powerful critique of current theoretical models in historiography and literary theory. Intellectually alive from start to finish, Holstun’s book captures the polemical energy of the early modern radicals he discusses.”—David Norbrook, Merton Chair of Literature, Oxford University

“Thoroughly thought-provoking.”—History

“Ehud’s Dagger brings the events of the Civil War period and the ordinary people who made them to life.”—Observer

“An examination of radical projects which demonstrate the practical contribution of working people to the 1650s.”—History Today

“Powerfully cogent, often brilliant in its stylistic sophistication, and magisterial in the range of its scholarship ... A work brimming with intelligence.”—Chris Fitter, Rutgers University

“An intense, thoroughly researched new Marxist study of the English Revolution.”—Choice

“As an antidote to the distortions of revisionism and as an expression of the continuing vitality of Marxist historiography, Ehud’s Dagger is particularly welcome. Three cheers for it!”—Albion

“Holstun writes with a meticulous attention to historical detail, evoking the sense of peering into the past through a window in time.”—Reviewer’s BookwatchJames Holstun is the author of Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America and the editor of Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution. He is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Buffalo.