Occasional Comments on Early Modern History (March, 2013) extracts

 

A surprise from Christopher Hill "Those who dislike bull baiting will dislike healthy sports like fox-hunting."Christopher Hill, England's Turning Point. Essays on 17th century English history (Bookmarks. London, 1998), p.200.

Author's Subject: Re: Bellany on the Russell festschriftDate Written: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 15:33:48 -0400Date Posted on H-Albion: Thu, 10 Sep 2003

Alastair's Bellany's review of the festschrift for Conrad Russell edited by

Tom Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake was characteristically

intelligent and penetrating. It made a number of extremely important points

about the evolution of studies of the early Stuart period since Conrad

Russell began working in the 1960s. I was, however, surprised to see him

commenting on "how ossified and uncritical historical understanding of

early Stuart high political history had become by the early-1970s,

sheltered in a pretty-much neglected corner as the storm over the gentry

raged across the stage." As someone whose historical career began in that

decade, I believe that this goes too far. It was by the mid-1950s that the

major contributions to the "gentry controversy" were made thereby

generating a range of studies from important figures like M.E.Finch and

Alan Simpson as well as doctoral theses from younger historians like Gordon

Blackwood and J.T.Cliffe. Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy

1558-1641 (completed in c.1963 and published in 1965) served as a coda to

this phase of historical enquiry. Attention was shifting elsewhere, for

example, to the study of county history inspired by the work of Tom Barnes

and of Alan Everitt. Christopher Hill was pursuing his studies of

Puritanism and just beginning to consider the elements of popular culture

upon which he later wrote. There was (in my recollection) more interest

amongst postgraduates and dons in Oxford and London in teasing out the

implications of the Court/Country divisions postulated by Hugh Trevor-Roper

than there was in stoking the embers of the "gentry controversy". Perez

Zagorin's work on that subject was written in the 1960s. Menna Prestwich

had published on Cranfield's career: J.P.Cooper was writing on aspects of

the role of Sir Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford; Theodore K.Rabb

was investigating and publishing on Sir Edwin Sandys's career. Valerie

Pearl was doing work on the high politics of the Long Parliament of a

quality not matched before or since; David Underdown was working on a later

period in its history. Brian Farrell was completing his Ph.D. on the 3rd

Earl of Pembroke just as I was beginning my study of the career of the 2nd

Earl of Warwick. Nicholas Tyacke had written his much-quoted thesis on the

impact of Arminianism on the Church of England and on national politics by

1968. Even if we look for the origins of the revolt against the "Whig

interpretation" of Parliamentary history, it is possible to find evidence

from the 1960s as parts of John Ball's seminal 1954 Cambridge Ph.D. came

into the published domain. Geoffrey Elton's protest over the teleological

perspectives of "A High Road to Civil War" appeared in 1965. A significant

volume of work was being undertaken in the political history of the early

Stuart period in the 1960s. Just as Stone was proclaiming that his study of

the peerage was designed "to serve as a prolegomenon to, and explanation

of, political history" (Crisis, p.8), the study of the political and

religious history of the early to middle-Stuart period was being

reinvigorated. Conrad Russell once commented that Stone had attempted "to

explain events which did not happen in terms of a social change for which

the evidence remains uncertain"; it was hard in his view to reconcile the

latter's arguments with "the overwhelming evidence for Parliamentarians'

dependence on aristocratic leadership". Over thirty years later, he has

offered us his own hypotheses about the fortunes of the English Parliament

and of the Stuarts' three kingdoms. That intellectual journey began, if I

may say so, in a more vibrant and interesting period than Alastair Bellany

has allowed.

Christopher Thompson

Friday June 22nd, 2007 06:14 pm

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This is a message forwarded from Christopher Thompson, a seventeenth-century historian:Since the middle of last summer, I have been reading the works of a number of comparative historical sociologists on the period leading up to and beyond the rebellions, revolts and revolutions that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth-century. I must admit that figures like Julia Adams, Rosemary L.Hopcroft, Jack A.Goldstone, Mark Gould, Richard Lachmann, Edgar Kiser, Samuel Clark and Peter Bearman were unknown to me until I made a casual search on the subject of the "English Revolution" on JSTOR. There is clearly a considerable amount of work being done in North American sociology departments of significance to early modern English and European historians even though very little of it appears in academic journals dealing with the history of this period or in specialised history books. Two explanations occur to me for this apparent neglect. First of all, comparative historical sociologists seem preoccupied with the origins of capitalism in England and the consequences this had for the world's economy, a preoccupation that derives from Marx even though quite a few of these scholars are not Marxists themselves. Secondly, there is the problem that the agenda pursued by such historical sociologists scarcely relates to the interests of early modern historians: the impact made by Koenigsberger's work in the mid-1980s on the problems of multiple kingdoms and its development by historians like John Morrill, Conrad Russell, Jenny Wormald, Jane Ohlmeyer, and many others has, so it seems, passed comparative historical sociologists by. The intellectual world and explanatory priorities of Richard Lachmann are radically different from those of historians like Allan I. Macinnes and John Adamson. The obscure technical language and recondite analytical concepts employed in these sociological works, which are themselves usually based on the reading of secondary sources, act as a powerful deterrent to those who work in the surviving archives. This is a pity since the works of these scholars offer a powerful incentive to the reconsideration of one's own views and to fertile dissent which is almost always the progenitor of constructive new historical work.Christopher Thompson

Wednesday June 27th, 2007 01:22 pm

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The interchange between historians and sociologists is almost all one way. We read and use their work, but they pay attention to very little that we write. From what I can tell, that is mainly an Anglo-American problem, less so French, and much less so elsewhere. Too bad for me since my work, like many US historical sociologists, is oriented around the British case. Another problem is that, as Christopher Thompson points out, the current concerns among British historians are far removed from the Marxist questions (and mainly) non-Marxist theories we sociologists develop. At least in my case, it is not a lack of knowledge of this historical strain but rather a view that the issue of multiple kingdoms isn't as important as many current historians think it is, certainly not for understanding the origins of capitalism, British imperialism, or even the British state itself. When I make that argument, it certainly isn't something that British historians would have much interest in citing or debating, especially since I like most sociologists do not bring original archival research to the debate.The lack of archival research also makes it difficult to get published in historical journals, and of course for visibility in my discipline such publications are far less helpful than those in sociological journals. While the latter consideration matters much less at my stage of career, styles of research, argumentation and writing are hard to change. Interchanges across disciplines thus depend largely on scholars who makethe effort to bring work from other disciplines to colleagues in their owndiscipline. I like to think I do some of that, in bringing theoretical as well as empirical work by historians to the attention of sociologists. Perhaps the question we should pose to Christopher Thompson is whether there are historians doing the same for their colleagues with the work of the sociologists he cited, and if not whether he might want to take on that task.Richard Lachmann