The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford: 1621-1641.

These essays, many of them derived from an international conference held at Sheffield University in July 1994, are of major importance in advancing our understanding not only of Wentworth's career but of early Stuart political history in general. The revisionism of the late 1970s and 1980s convincingly demolished old Whig certainties, but as yet no new interpretative framework has emerged to replace them. To focus on the career of a key individual such as Wentworth provides an extremely fruitful way to explore fresh approaches, for, as Merritt writes in her excellent introduction, 'until historians can put forward an explanation that can encompass the extraordinarily complex and varied career of Wentworth, they cannot hope to explain the broader structures of British political life in the early Stuart period'. Wentworth's career cannot be strait-jacketed into existing interpretations, and by re-examining it this collection in …