Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century

Dorchester-the west-country town immortalized by Thomas Hardy as Casterbridge-was two hundred years before Hardy's time the most fervently religious town in England. The catalyst that turned a provincial backwater into a "godly community" was a great fire in 1613 that devastated much of the town and enabled the new pastor, John White, to lead the town in a kind of spiritual mass conversion that lasted for fifty years. In this book David Underdown describes the transformation of Dorchester, ...