‘Could It Just Possibly Be?’

Abstract

‘Could it just possibly be?’ Revel, Riot and Rebellion at Thirty Susan D. Amussen Has it been thirty years? I ask this because my relationship to David Underdown’s Revel Riot and Rebellion is more than academic. 1 When I entered graduate school at Brown University in 1976 he was finishing ‘The Chalk and the Cheese’ – so the questions and theories about allegiance and regional cultures that were at the center of the book were always part of my experience of him. 2 As my own work developed, and particularly as I was doing research for my dissertation, we shared ideas and interpretations as we both sought to understand early modern communities. These were rich exchanges, by letter or in person. There were a number of times when we were both working in the old P.R.O. on Chancery Lane, and spent lunches, or teas at the Institute of Historical Research making sense of Star Chamber cases he was reading, or Assize cases I was reading. He noted that conversation in the acknowledgments, as well as in the dedication of the book. What he did not say was that the book and the ideas in it were the intellectual soundtrack of our courtship; it was published soon after we were married. So the book itself played an important role in my life, intellectually and personally. Re-reading the book after thirty years to reflect on its ongoing impact, I am struck by three things. First, it was an idiosyncratic project, going against the tide of then fashionable historiography. Underdown was following his nose, the internal logic of his research and reading. The early 1980s were the heyday of Revisionism, which not only rejected the notion that there were long term causes of the Civil War and Revolution – something Underdown offers as a governing assumption on p. x – but also focused on elite politics, primarily at Court or sometimes in Parliament. When he reviewed the book in the London Review of Books alongside a book by David Starkey, Conrad Russell was plainly bemused that while, ‘If Dr Starkey wishes