Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War wins Samuel Pepys Award 2019
Stanford University professor and author David Como has won the Samuel Pepys Award 2019 for Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford University Press).
The biennial prize is awarded to a publication that makes the greatest contribution to our understanding of Samuel Pepys, his times or his contemporaries.
Sir Keith Thomas, one of the 2019 judges, described the book as “an outstanding work of meticulous research which throws new light on the origin of the radical political and religious ideas which led ultimately to the abolition of episcopacy, the execution of Charles I and the proclamation of a republic. According to Como, rather than emerging only after Charles I’s military defeat, the case for regicide and republicanism was propagated by sectarian preachers and secret printing presses from the very beginning of the Civil War. David Como’s exploration of this radical underground is a path-breaking contribution to the world in which Samuel Pepys grew up.”