Episode 149: Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 with Clare Jackson

Versus History Podcast

An interview with Dr Clare Jackson, the winner of Wolfson History Prize 2022 about her book, ‘Devil-Land:
England Under Siege, 1588-1688′. Clare is the Senior tutor of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. The description for the book:
Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as ‘Devil-Land’: a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Clare Jackson’s dazzling account of English history’s most radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis.
As an unmarried, childless heretic, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering rule of Charles II and James II, before William of Orange invaded and a new order was imposed.
Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a ‘failed state’: endemically unstable and rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts – many penned by stupefied foreigners – to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and concluding with a not-so ‘Glorious Revolution’ a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England’s vexed and enthralling past.
To check the book out, visit the link here.
For more on the Wolfson History Prize, here is the link.
For Clare's website, visit here.