A surprise from Michael Sturza

I was surprised this morning to find that Michael Sturza had read my very brief note on Parliamentary History before Conrad Russell and the Rise of Revisionism. He had a book on the role of London between 1640 and 1643 published a couple of years ago setting out the case for the role of the capital as the focus for the class animosities that he believed had stimulated the start of the Civil Wars of the 1640s in England. I did not find this convincing, especially in the light of Valerie Pearl's 1961 book on London from 1625 until the early-1640s. Nor did I think his subscription to the Marxist doctrines of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning at all plausible. And I said so. Whether he has changed his mind I rather doubt but the historiography has moved on a long way since the 1950s and early-1960s.

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