EMH EarlyModernHistory

  I have read this comment on Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World, with some interest. The authors – Pip and Mara – put forward what they consider to be the failings of Healey’s analysis well written though they rightly agree that the work was. Their case is that Healey’s narrative account of the events of the early-1640s was incomplete because it did not identify the underlying structural causes; there was no class analysis of the kind Marxists consider essential to explain the rise of the bourgeoisie over the preceding century. Feudal and absolutist rule had blocked the development of capitalist social relations and had to be overthrown. Healey offered colour without explanation and subscribed to the ‘revisionist’ project of Conrad Russell and John Morrill in denying the existence of a rising bourgeoisie and, by implication, that of a bourgeois revolution. Mid-seventeenth century politics appeared to be merely instrumental, the revolution as unjustified and Healey’s presen...

 Photo by Sandy Solomon on her Facebook page.

 I began reading Robert Ashton's book again last evening after a gap of many years. I had forgotten the high quality of his writing in his later years at the UEA and his acute appreciation of the contours of Court and Country culture in the early Stuart period. Interestingly, he had some sharp points to make about the excessive attention given to the Levellers and Diggers in the historiography of the 1640s, attention inspired in part, he suggested, by modern political apprehensions. There is something in this observation in my view but I should be interested to learn what others think on thi s issue.

 

 

 

  Speech, stereotypes and the making of political division in England, 1641-42 Date 14 May 2026, 17:30 to 14 May 2026, 19:00 Venue Hybrid | Online & IHR Pollard Seminar Room, N301, Third Floor, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU