EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Waseem Ahmed’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England  (Counterfire. 19 October, 2023) Waseeem Ahmed is probably best known for his current postgraduate work at University College, London on the politics of the Interregnum between 1649 and 1660 and for his role in organising the recent conference at the Institute of Historical Research on the impact and influence of Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down. It is, therefore, no surprise that his review of Jonathan Healey’s work, The Blazing World, is generally laudatory, praising its assessment of the transformation of English society in the seventeenth century and its synthesis of detailed academic research and sound analytical judgment. Healey’s view of early-seventeenth English society as fractured and subject to economic and social changes -e.g. In the rise of the gentry and the middling sort, political and religious polarisation, disputes over the location of sove

 

In 1968, which is longer ago than I care to contemplate, I was pursuing my research in the British Museum's manuscript room when I was introduced to R.C.Johnson, the American historian who had just been appointed to edit the sources for the Yale University's project on the Parliament of 1628. I had been doing the work on the Parliaments of the 1620s that later led to my essay on the origins of the politics of the 'middle group' published in 1972 and had become acquainted with a large number of previously unused manuscripts on this subject. In the course of our conversations, I mentioned to Professor Johnson that a set of notes by Sir Nathaniel Rich on proceedings in the House of Commons in 1628 survived in what was then the Huntingdon Record Office. (He was generous enough to offer me a job on the Yale project at that time, an offer I turned down because (a) I was fully engaged in my own research on the 2nd Earl of Warwick at the University of Oxford and (b) I presumptu