EMH EarlyModernHistory

  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, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 , published in 1972. It is...

 

 

  The importance of the negotiations between the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, and the Virginia and Bermuda companies from the summer of 1622 over a contract to import tobacco into England has been analysed in works by historians from the time of W.R.Scott and Wesley Frank Craven in the last century to the present day. Although agreement was reached, the unfavourable nature of the terms and the salaries to be paid to the dominant party in the two companies led by Sir Edwin Sandys, the Ferrar brothers and their supporters produced a reaction so hostile that the contract had to be abandoned. Once news of the Indian massacre of English settlers in Virginia in March, 1622 reached England, the fate of the Virginia Company of London hung in the balance. Eventually, Sandys’s enemies led by the 2 nd Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas Smith, the former Treasurer of the company and a major mercantile figure, secured the dissolution of the Virginia Company and the ejection of Sandys and...

 Andrew Thrush has some informative comments on the enemies of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham in the Parliaments of the 1620s available  here  .

  Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England Susan North Oxford, Oxford University Press,  2020 , ISBN: 9780198856139; 368pp.; Price: £70.00 Reviewer: Dr Beverly Lemire University of Alberta, Canada Citation: Dr Beverly Lemire, review of  Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England , (review no. 2416) DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2416 Date accessed: 23 October, 2020 Students of history are not always aware when they live through major historiographic change; shifts are sometimes only recognizable in hindsight, with accumulated divergences sharply evident against the backdrop of the field. This volume by Susan North marks a historiographic advance from several perspectives, bringing questions of training, habit, labour, and lifestyle in early modern England into close conversation with health, fashion, morality, and materiality. Cleanliness—its presence and its absence—is the core focus. There has been some recent scholarship in this subject area...

 I saw part of last evening's conference on line on this essential resource for the events of the 1640s in Stuart Ireland. A short introduction to this resource can be found  here  .