From Revisionist to Royalist History; or, Was Charles I the First Whig Historian

Abstract

This essay is intended, in large part, as an homage to Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky. It locates their work within the course of Revisionist and post-Revisionist scholarship since the 1970s. In so doing, it highlights and comments upon the consequences of the inversionary impulse at the heart of the Revisionist project. What started out as aggressive Revisionism had, by the late 1990s or early 2000s, produced a decidedly Royalist interpretation, recapitulating many of the central features of the view of Charles I and his supporters. Since that view featured some of the main claims of what would become Whig historiography, the result was something of a perfect circle described by the historiography within a period of barely thirty years. The essay claims that this syndrome reached its most coherent form in the most recent work of Sharpe and Kishlansky and then tentatively suggests some ways out of the resulting predicament.