Leveller Tracts - Bibliography

Bibliography and Other Resources on the Levellers

[updated: May 7, 2015]

Table of Contents

  • Additional Information on the Levellers.
  • Primary Sources
  • Secondary Sources

Additional Information on the Levellers.

The following material on the English Revolution is available at the Online Library of Liberty:

  • 1.  The English Revolution topic page: </collections/68>.
  • 2.  Key Documents of Liberty: 17th Century England </pages/key-documents>.
  • 3.  Joyce Lee Malcom, The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century English Political Tracts, 2 vols, ed. Joyce Lee Malcolm (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). < /titles/1823>.
  • 4.  Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660, selected and edited by Samuel Rawson Gardiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). < /titles/1434 >.
  • 5.  Arthur Sutherland Pigott Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army Debates (1647-9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, selected and edited with an Introduction A.S.P. Woodhouse, foreword by A.D. Lindsay (University of Chicago Press, 1951). < /titles/2183 >.
  • 6.  Sir William Clarke, The Clarke Papers. Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, Secretary to the Council of the Army, 1647-1649, and to General Monck and the Commanders of the Army in Scotland, 1651-1660, ed. C.H. Firth (Camden Society, 1901). 4 vols. < /titles/1983 >.

For additional information about the authors and texts we recommend the following works for their useful introductions, scholarly footnotes, and commentaries. A number of them reproduce the texts in facsimile form so readers can see what the original texts looked like.

Primary Sources

Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth and Restoration, collected by George Thomason, 1640-1661, G.K. Finlayson (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1908), 2 vols.

  • Vol. 1. Catalogue of the Collection, 1640-1652
  • Vol. 2. Catalogue of the Collection, 1653-1661. Newspapers. Index.

The Clarke Papers. Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, Secretary to the Council of the Army, 1647-1649, and to General Monck and the Commanders of the Army in Scotland, 1651-1660, ed. C.H. Firth (Camden Society, 1901). 4 vols.

The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings, edited and with an Introduction by A.L. Morton. Foreword by Christopher Hill (New York: International Publishers, 1975).

Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, Edited, with an introduction and commentaries by Don M. Wolfe. Foreword by Charles Beard (New York: Humanities Press, 1967). (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944).

H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited and prepared for publication by Christopher Hill (Manchester: Spokesman Books, 1976).

The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, edited by William Haller and Godfrey Davies (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964). (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).

Marie Gimelfarb-Brack, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Justice: La vie et l’oeuvre de Richard Overton, Niveleur (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979).

Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647-9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, selected and edited by A.S.P. Woodhouse. Foreword by A.D. Lindsay (University of Chicago Press, 1951).

Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638-1647, edited, with a Commentary, by William Haller. Volume I. Commentary. Volume II. Facsimiles, Part I. Volume III. Facsimiles, Part II. (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1965) (Columbia University Press, 1934).

The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft. Foreword by Christopher Hill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981).

Secondary Sources

Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 volumes, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983).

  • Volume I: A-F
  • Volume II: G-O
  • Volume III: P-Z

Carl Watner, “ ‘Come What, Come Will!’ Richard Overton, Libertarian Leveller,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. IV, no. 4 (Fall 1980), pp. 405-432,

Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).

Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Penguin, 1985).

P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

David Wootton, “Leveller democracy and the Puritan Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J.H. Burns with the assistance of Mark Goldie (Cambridge University Press), pp. 412-42.

Joseph Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth Century Social Democrats, John Liburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955).

Richard A. Gleissner, “The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647,” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, (Autumn 1980), pp. 74-89.

William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).

Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

A. Sharp, Political Ideas of the English Civil War 1641-1649 (London: Longman, 1983).

C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1975).

Politics and People in Revolutionary England, ed. C. Jones M. Newitt, and S. Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

Michael B. Levy, “Property and the Levellers: The Case of John Lilburne,” The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 1983), pp. 116-33.

The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State, ed. Michael Mendle (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

L. Solt, Saints in Arms: Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell’s Army (Stanford University Press, 1959).

Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).

Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton University Press, 1980).

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

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