EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Gillett on Gregory, 'Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty' by  H-Net Reviews Eilish Gregory.   Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty.  Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2021. 248 pp. $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78327-594-6. Reviewed by  Christopher P. Gillett (The University of Scranton)  Published on  H-Albion (November, 2022)  Commissioned by  Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth (Red Deer Polytechnic) Printable Version:  https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=57696 Eilish Gregory’s  Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660  offers the first book-length analysis of how the English Catholic laity attempted to navigate the penal laws, particularly the economic penalties of sequestration and compounding, during the mid-seventeenth century. Gregory situates her volume as part of an attempt to bridge a chronological gap in research on the “mainstream” political signifi

 I have just heard that this conference due to be held at the Institute of Historical Research in London on Saturday, 26th November, 2022 is to be moved to a date between December, 2022 and February, 2022. 

 Earlier today, the ASLEF trades union announced that it would be holding strikes at twelve rail operating companies on Saturday, 26th November. This may create serious difficulties for historians hoping to travel to the conference on Christopher Hill's work, The World Turned Upside Down, published fifty years ago at the Institute of Historical Research in London on that day.  

  I was interested to read or rather to re-read Ann Talbot’s reflections from March, 2003 on Christopher Hill’s life and career. This assessment had two aspects, one political dealing with his trajectory as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and admirer of the former Soviet Union until his departure after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and a second considering his historiographical legacy and its influence on and importance for later historical work. As one of his former postgraduate pupils, I ought to begin by saying that I always got on perfectly well with him in personal terms in the late-1960s and again when I last saw him and his wife, Bridget, at the Huntington Library in California in January, 1997. By then, of course, his corpus of work had been overtaken by the so-called ‘revisionist’ revolt of the 1970s and by the assault on his methods by figures like J.H.Hexter and Mark Kishlansky.   It is with the second of Ann Talbot’s arguments that I most concerned here.