Christopher Hill (John Edward Christopher Hill) Biography

British historian, born in York, educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he became a fellow of the college in 1938 and its Master in 1965. Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), and The World Turned Upside Down (1972) are among the publications which established his reputation as the leading historian of the Civil War period. Hill's socialist convictions inform his writings, which encompass a broad spectrum of human experience through comprehensive attention to the political, economic, and religious dimensions of the era. Literary sources are widely used in his work; Milton and the English Revolution (1977) examines the poet's responses to the failure of the Commonwealth, while the writings of Marvell and others are surveyed in The Experience of Defeat (1984). His numerous other books include Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (1971), A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), the three volumes of his Collected Essays (1985–6), and The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993).