This book, by one of the foremost living historians of seventeenth-century England, is a wholesale revision of his classic Authority and Conflict, England 1603-1658 (1986). Hirst has drawn on a decade of research that has appeared since the original book to produce a wholly fresh work. Centered around ambiguities of community in early modern England, the text enlivens debates over revisionism, puritanism, the church, and witchcraft while at the same time making sense of the complexities of crisis and continuity.