EMH EarlyModernHistory

From left to right at the table were seated (1) Anthony Milton (University of Sheffield) (2) Peter Lake (Vanderbilt University) and (3) Michael Braddick (University of Sheffield). This photograph was posted on Dr Neil Younger's twitter account and is copied from there. (No restrictions were indicated forbidding its reproduction.)  

  I am afraid that Sturza’s account of the events of the 1640s and your analysis of its merits (and faults) is not correct, Keith. First of all, the historiography of this period is wrong. The problems with a materialist or Marxist explanation were apparent well before the rise of so-called ‘Revisionism’ in the mid-1970s. The debates over the fortunes of the gentry between Tawney and Stone on one side and Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other had stimulated a raft of research into the condition of landowners In many counties across England but also the growth of county studies and the hypothesis first advanced by Alan Everitt about the importance of localism in the ensuing conflicts. (John Morrill actually cut his historical teeth in this area and has never to my knowledge subscribed to the view that the English Civil War or Revolution came as a bolt from the blue.) In Cambridge, the work of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group called into very serious question whether any classes in

  New from Oxford:   Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea    by David Cressy. Please share with your networks.  Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea,  the newest book by historian David Cressy, shows how wrecks on the coasts of early modern England were not just catastrophes for merchants and mariners, but opportunities for people of the shore where, as the proverb said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good.   Lords of manors, local officials, officers of the Admiralty, and coastal commoners competed for maritime cargoes and the windfall of wreckage, which they regarded as providential godsends or entitlements by right. A varied haul of commodities, wines, furnishings, and bullion came ashore, much of it claimed by the crown. The people engaged in salvaging these wrecks came to be called 'wreckers', and gained a reputation as violent and barbarous plunderers. Close attention to statements of witnesses and reports of survivors shows this image to be largely undeserved.