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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration. Edited by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ix + 337 pages.
Cromwell's Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution. By Christopher Durston. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. x + 260 pages.
Oliver Cromwell. By J. C. Davis. London: Arnold, 2001. ix + 243 pages.
Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity. By Blair Worden. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001. xii + 387 pages.
Christopher Hill, whose lively and challenging work spanned six decades of the twentieth century, published in 1974 what quickly became one of his most provocative books. This was Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, a collection of twelve essays which was savagely attacked for what were considered to be its methodological shortcomings by J. H. Hexter in a review in The Times Literary Supplement. A spirited debate followed in that publication and extended out into a number of scholarly journals. In this book, as in many of his others, Hill advanced the view that the middle decades of the seventeenth century witnessed the English Revolution, a defining and momentous discontinuity which effectively brought the Middle Ages in England to a close. It unleashed a series of economic, social, and political consequences which reverberated for long after and made possible the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution and the arrival of parliamentary democracy. (Later books by Hill--Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution [1980] and A Nation of Change and Novelty [1990] forcefully revisited these themes). Grouped in sections dealing with "Changing Relationships," "Change in Continuity," "Continuity in Change," and "Change out of Continuity," Hill's essays in the 1974 publication moved from witches and cunning men in the dark corners of the land to Newton, "high priest of modern science," and Locke, "high priest of modern utilitarian ethics and politics." But these "high priests," Hill was quick to insist, pointing forward to a more familiar future, also had one foot planted firmly in the past. Newton combined his path-breaking scientific studies with a keen interest in alchemy and biblical prophecy. Locke, the author of Two Treatises of Government (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) also devoted himself to predicting from the evidence contained in the Book of Daniel the date of the end of the world and believed that pain in the kidneys could be cured by burying the patient's urine in a stone jug in the earth. In this book as in his others, what had once been inadequately summarized as "the Puritan Revolution" was Hill's central preoccupation, and the complex climate of ideas which it both generated and put to the test. Losers as well as winners, unconscious (as well as conscious) revolutionaries, and diehard conservatives figured in his pages. Se did their shifting reputations in later periods. "There is a dialectic of continuity and change," Hill declared, "not only in the seventeenth century itself but also in our awareness of the seventeenth century. We ourselves are shaped by the past; but from our vantage point in the present we are continually reshaping the past which shapes us" (284). There is no history without historiography. The four books reviewed here in different ways examine the interface between the two.
The title of the book edited by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus--A Nation Transformed--connects itself with the spirit behind Hill's Change and Continuity, but here the emphasis is principally on the decades which followed the Restoration of 1660. The book originated in a conference held at the Huntington Library in California, a fertile seedbed of scholarship, and the editors bring together contributions from six historians, four English literature professors, and one political scientist, predominantly from North America. Perhaps too loosely organized for its own good--the editors do not quite succeed in welding together the disparate contributions--the central preoccupation in all the essays is with the forces of change at work in the later seventeenth century. Continuities with the recent past, however, are recognized, particularly the "scorched historical memories" (19), the insistent, ineradicable legacy of the Civil Wars. Tim Harris shows how post-1660 popular politics...
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