EMH EarlyModernHistory

 

  Parliamentary history before Conrad Russell and the rise of revisionism Whatever view one takes of the merits of his arguments, there can be no doubt that Conrad Russell was a major figure in seventeenth-century historiography. His rise to eminence began in the 1970s when he first challenged many of the assumptions which he then considered to underlie the analysis of early Stuart political history. Traditional ideas about conflicts between Crown and Parliament, on Parliament as a ‘great power’ in the State divided between supporters of ‘government’ and ‘opposition’, on debates as a contest for ‘power’ between these two sides and over a ‘High Road’ leading inexorably to Civil War attracted his critical scrutiny. He objected to reading Parliamentary history backwards from the 1640s with all the teleological implications of doing so whilst making a powerful case for the proposition that early Stuart Parliaments were not powerful and did not contain an ‘opposition’. Russe...

  The Framework of the Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 The contribution made by Professor Stone to the study of the economic and social history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been one of the outstanding features of post-war scholarship. Ever since the publication in 1965 of his major work, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 , we have been indebted to him for a new account of the fortunes of the landed elite in this period. The complex crisis which he detected in the affairs of the peerage helped to explain why the outbreak of the English Civil war became possible. The book was rightly recognised as one of the most important to appear on early modern English history for many years and the qualities of mind it displayed won widespread admiration. Professor Stone’s control over a mass of evidence, his willingness to employ the most up-to-date methods of enquiry and the striking insights to be found throughout his text together made the study a truly...

I have long been fascinated by obscure, sometimes hidden groups at work on the British Isles in the early modern period in which I am most interested. Who would have thought that there were such groups of historians in South America? Who has read their works or those of historians studying the events of the same period in eastern Europe? I have spent a lot of time in recent years following the attempts in the U.K. to rehabilitate the works of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning and now hope that I have a better understanding of the people involved. It is no surprise, nonetheless, to discover that these two figures are much more prominent in the historiographical works produced since c.1990 in the countries formerly dominated by the Soviet Union. A few days ago, I came across the 2005 thesis of Sergey Fedorov on the Early Stuart Nobility and read its abstract with some interest. It led me to other Russian works - e.g. that by Ilya Grigorievich on the Order of the Garter in the same late-...

I had been planning to go to the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford to conduct some long-delayed manuscript research but fate intervened or rather confusion and I was not able to go. Later in the week perhaps. But I did manage to get to the University Library after lunch and, after some indecision, opted to read the first ninety pages or so of the late Clive Holmes's 2005 book, Why Was Charles I Executed? It had all the qualities I remember so well from the time I first met him when he was a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. There was intellectual confidence in abundance, clear writing and a sharp case explaining why the Long Parliament won the first English Civil War against the forces of King Charles I. Holmes maintained that, apart from its material advantages in controlling London and the counties of south-eastern England as well as the navy, Parliament's supporters were more ideologically committed to their cause than their opponents. The latter were const...

  Conference: Rethinking State and Society in Early Modern Britain Tuesday, December 17, 2024 9:30 AM 6:00 PM River Room, King's Building Strand London, WC2R 2LS (map) It is almost twenty-five years since the publication of two landmark studies of state and society in early modern Britain: Michael Braddick’s State Formation (Cambridge, 2000) and Steve Hindle’s The State and Social Change (Palgrave, 2000). These texts have shaped a generation of scholarship on politics, society, law, and power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This conference asks where this scholarship is now and where it might be going next. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars with specialisms ranging from law and lit...