A Short Note on Lawrence Stone's article on 'The Revival of Narrative'
A Short Note on Lawrence Stone’s article on ‘The Revival of Narrative’ Quite by chance, I came across Lawrence Stone’s 1979 article on this subject yesterday evening. It was originally published in Past and Present and subsequently appeared in his 1987 collection of essays, The Past and Present Revisited . I have commented before on the way in which Stone, who was at Princeton University from 1963, lost touch with the evolution of historiographical thinking in the U.K. about the origins, course and outcomes of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Inevitably, perhaps, Stone was surprised the development of ‘revisionism’ from the middle of that decade onwards. This sense of disassociation has something to do, I suspect, with Stone’s account of the works of “the new British school of young antiquarian empiricists” led by Conrad Russell and John Kenyon and urged on by Geoffrey Elton. According to Stone, they were writing political narratives implicitly denying t