Lawrence Stone and the historiography of the 'gentry controversy'
LAWRENCE STONE AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE GENTRY CONTROVERSY The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of his work...
I shall be intrigued to see how Rees argues his case on this subject. Fifty or more years ago, there was a group of Marxist historians working along Marxist lines but, by the mid-1970s, they had been overtaken by the advent of the revisionists. Hardly any early modern historians subscribe to the kind of explanations advanced by figures like Christopher Hill or Brian Manning. Admittedly, there is interest in Hill's career but you have to go the South America or former Communist countries to find his views replicated.
ReplyDelete