History Of Early Modern England Research Articles

George Chapman’ın Ceasar and Pompey Trajedisi ve Arabulucu Cato

The classical Roman past has been a rich source for the playwrights who desire to make literary connections between the ancient political characters and real life figures. George Chapman, a neglected playwright of the seventeenth century, uses the Roman Empire allegory in Caesar and Pompey: A Roman Tragedy (1631) to respond to the political dissagreements which lead England into the Civil War. Through Caesar and Pompey, Chapman conveys possible scenarios that correspond to specific political events in the history of early modern England. Using new historicism as a theoretical framework, this paper analyzes Chapman’s play as a political allegory of the dispute between Charles I and Parliamentarians, leading the three kingdoms into war in 1642. Drawing a parallel between the Roman republic depicted in the play and the specific moments of early modern world, this paper discusses how Cato acts as Chapman’s mouthpiece and the ardent supporter of political negotiation rather than conflict. Thus, the paper contributes to the scholarship about Chapman who uses the history of Roman republic as a warning for the future of English politics during the Elizabethan period.

REFORMING FOOD AND EATING IN PROTESTANT ENGLAND, c. 1560–c. 1640

AbstractAs the field of food history has come to fruition in the last few decades, cultural historians of early modern England have begun to recognize the significance of food and eating practices in the process of identity construction. Yet its effect on religious identities has yet to be written. This article illuminates a printed discourse in which Protestants laboured to define a new relationship to food and eating in light of the Reformation, from Elizabeth I's reign up until the Civil War. It is based on a wealth of religious tracts written by the clergy, alongside the work of physicians in the form of dietaries and regimens, which together highlight the close relationship between bodily and spiritual concerns. As a result of the theological changes of the Reformation, reformers sought to desacralize Catholic notions of holy food. However, by paying greater attention to the body, this article argues that eating continued to be a religiously significant act, which could both threaten spiritual health and enrich it. This discourse on food and eating helped draw the confessional boundaries and identities of the Reformation period, and so offers a rewarding and novel insight into English Protestantism.

The History of Secret Histories

The History of Secret Histories Brian Cowan (bio) Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell, editors The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017 xii + 282 pages; isbn: 9781107150461 Peter Burke Secret History and Historical Consciousness: From Renaissance to Romanticism brighton, u.k.: edward everett root, 2016 ix + 259 pages; isbn: 9781911204381 the history of "secret histories" is no longer much of a secret. The last two decades have seen a growing body of historical and literary scholarship devoted to detailing the growth and the significance of this particular genre. The history of secret histories appeals for many reasons. The secret history stands at the intersection of several different modes of fiction and nonfiction writing, and it became prominent at roughly the same time that other well-known genres emerged, especially the fictional novel and new forms of factual narratives that attended to the problems of proof needed to persuade readers they were "true." It appeared at the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between public and private worlds. If, for an earlier generation of scholars, this generic and epistemic uncertainty made these stories appear unsettling, not easily categorizable, and hence best dismissed as unreliable or confidently ignored as unimportant, they now fascinate scholars who are interested in exploring such liminal texts. Just as attention to the historical contexts in which literature was created and received has become largely uncontroversial in literary studies, a reciprocal awareness of the constructedness of historical narratives has allowed [End Page 121] historians to appreciate that the boundaries between fact and fiction are never clear-cut, especially before the "rise of fictionality" in the later eighteenth century.1 The recent publication of two collections of essays affords a window into the ways in which both literary and historical scholars have approached secret histories. Although such studies depend on the work of scholars from both fields, there are some striking differences between literary and historical approaches. While it might be an exaggeration to say that there are two distinct histories of the secret history, there seem to be at least two styles of writing about it. The first is literary, and this tradition is best exemplified by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's remarkably wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays, The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820. The second is political, and Peter Burke's Secret History and Historical Consciousness introduces some of the concerns of this style. An interest in the historical significance of the form is particularly prominent among political historians of early modern England and France. What was a secret history? Literary and political historians tend to have slightly different understandings of the term, and this may account for their distinct approaches. In Bullard and Carnell's volume, as in literary history more generally, it is treated as a particular form of historical storytelling anchored by notions of authorship, canon, and genre. These scholars trace the emergence and development of the secret history genre by studying the reception and adaptation of certain key texts. Although they disagree about precisely which texts are "key" to the canon, scholars who treat secret histories as literature generally take this approach. Perhaps paradoxically, literary accounts tend therefore to be more "historical," in the sense of being rooted in a particular place and time, than the studies produced by political historians. Thus Rebecca Bullard elsewhere defines the genre as "a polemical form of historiography that flourished during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth."2 By contrast, political historians of secret histories tend to see them as part of a certain style of political thinking, something akin to what Richard Hofstadter identified in the American context as a "paranoid style."3 This stylistic approach sees such stories as the product of a view of politics that is above all suspicious. Secret histories [End Page 122] are obsessed with duplicity and dedicated to unmasking the disguises adopted by political actors—not only the deceitful actions of those in government but also the ruses adopted by those seeking to undermine an established regime. They see people as naturally inclined to deception and tending to corruption. This view of human nature...

The Irrelevance of Revisionism: Gender, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England

Revisionism’s rise to prominence in the 1970s coincided with the emergence of feminist history. Yet the two shared little, and Revisionism’s insistence on the autonomy of politics was at odds with the feminist analysis of power and politics in household and community relations; as feminist historians sought to expand the conception of the political, Revisionists sought to narrow it. Yet Revisionism had much in common with a strain of social history that focused on the particular and local as against broad narratives of change, and emphasized stability and consensus rather than conflict. However, both the social and political history of early modern England have to be able to account for the conflict that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century. This essay shows how gender—and, in particular, gendered inversion—provides a way to pull together social, political, and gender history.

Elizabeth Clarke Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century EnglandPolitics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England. Elizabeth Clarke. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. v+265.

<i>Elizabeth Clarke</i> Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England<i>Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Elizabeth Clarke. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. v+265.

The Final crisis of the Stuart monarchy: the revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European contexts

There has been an explosion of interest in the Glorious Revolution in recent years. Long regarded as the lesser of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions, a faint after tremor following the major earthquake of mid-century, it is now coming to be seen as a major transformative episode in its own right, a landmark event which marked a distinctive break in British history. This collection sheds new light on the final crisis of the Stuart monarchy by re-examining the causes and implications of the dynastic shift of 1688-9 from a broad chronological, intellectual and geographical perspective. Comprising eleven essays by specialists in the field, it ranges from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, deals with the history of ideas as well as political and religious history, and covers not just England, Scotland and Ireland but also explores the Atlantic and European contexts. Covering high politics and low politics, Tory and Whig political thought, and the experiences of both Catholics and Protestants, it ranges from protest and resistance to Jacobitism and counter-revolution and even offers an evaluation of British attitudes towards slavery. Written in a lively and engaging style and designed to be accessible to a broader audience, it combines new research with the latest scholarship to provide a fresh and invigorating introduction to the revolutionary period that transformed Britain and its empire. TIM HARRIS is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History at Brown University. STEPHEN TAYLOR is Professor in the History of Early Modern England at Durham University. Contributors: Toby Barnard, Tony Claydon, John Gibney, Lionel K.J. Glassey, Gabriel Glickman, Mark Goldie, Tim Harris, John Marshall, Alasdair Raffe, Owen Stanwood, Stephen Taylor

Turning the World Upside Down: Gender and Inversion in the work of David Underdown

AbstractThe concept of inversion, or the world turned upside down, was a central theme in the work that David Underdown produced in the second half of his scholarly career. His writing on the subject began with the subject of scolds and skimmingtons, but extended over time to the examination of Jacobean court scandals and Jacobean drama. This article examines the development of Underdown's thinking about the subject, and in particular his emerging conviction that inversion provided a way of connecting the social, cultural, and political history of early modern England. Finally, it reflects on Underdown's unfinished manuscript on the subject, and shows how the study of inversion in early modern society and culture illuminates, and is illuminated by postmodern approaches to identity, the feminist concept of patriarchal equilibrium, and recent scholarship on humor.

Reading, Writing and Gender in Early Modern Scotland

It is only too easy to extrapolate from the better-evidenced, and so somewhat more scrutable, cultural history of early modern England, and to assume that literacy and print-culture in Scotland developed on roughly similar lines. But Scotland's culture is distinct in a variety of respects, and seems to have presented particular difficulties to women. The differences between the two make it possible to probe the fundamental question of the preconditions which permit, or prevent, creative expression.The work of recovering texts by early modern women writers of English has been going on for more than twenty years now. It is fair to say that the terrain has been mapped, so it is therefore now possible to reflect on the fact that all this work of rediscovery has flushed out remarkably few Scotswomen. So few, in fact, as to prompt the question, 'why?' since it certainly has not been for want of looking.The facts are these. Scotland produced one major published woman poet, Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (?1570s - after 1630). Her vision-poem Ane Godlie Dreame was printed again and again in Scotland after the first edition in 1603, at least thirteen times down to 1737. Lady Culross also left verse in manuscript: most of what survives is written on the last thirteen leaves of a manuscript volume of sermons by Robert Bruce preached in autumn 1590 and spring 1591, now in New College Library, Edinburgh.1 Though Lady Culross's poetry has remarkable qualities of its own, she does not employ the classical tropes, similes and comparanda from ancient history which come naturally to her English contemporary, Aemilia Lanier, or her slightly later fellow-Calvinists, Katherine Philips and Anne Bradstreet.Apart from Lady Culross, remarkably little writing by Scotswomen was printed either in their lifetimes, or posthumously.2 The only other Scotswomen to publish before 1700 were Anna Hume, whose Petrarch translation, The triumphs of: love: chastitie: death came out in 1644 (she also edited her father's History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus)> and an unidentified 'Lady of Honour' who published a broadsheet poem puffing the Darien Scheme in 1699, The Golden Island?Women's writings in manuscript are also scanty.4 Three women's names are associated with the group of poets which grew up round James VI in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, Christian Lindsay, whose surviving poem (if she is not a literary fiction) defends Montgomerie,5 Elizabeth Douglas, who wrote two poems in praise of William Fowler's Petrarch translations, and Lady Mary Beaton, also a friend of Fowler's.6 These women seem to have circulated a little occasional verse within court circles, since their poems made it into miscellany manuscripts. Also from the 1580s, a magnificent lovepoem written by one woman to another survives in the Maitland Quarto Manuscript, possibly by Marie Maitland, one of its compilers, while Evelyn Newlyn has recently argued that other verse in this manuscript may be hers.7 A noblewoman of the next generation, Margaret Cunningham, daughter of the seventh earl of Glencairn, wrote a sequence of three spiritual sonnets in 1606 which survives;8 Lady Grissell Baillie and Lady Wardlaw, both born late in the seventeenth century, are the probable authors of, respectively, a song and a ballad.Other coteries which included women are discernable in Scotland. John Knox was closely involved with Anne Lock, an English woman writer,9 and Theo van Heijnsbergen and Nicola Royan also point to his involvement with 'a landed literary coterie' in Scotland, that of Cockburn of Ormiston and his wife Alison Sandelandis.10 Sandelandis was the dedicatee of Sir Henry Balnaves's Confession of Faiths sent on to her by Knox and eventually printed in 1584.11In the generation after Fowler, women formed part of the cultural nexus around Drummond of Hawthornden (Fowler's nephew) and his brother-inlaw Scot of Scotstarvet.12 A commendatory poem by Mary Oxlie of Morpeth was prefixed to the posthumous edition of Drummond's works edited by Edward Phillips and printed in London. …

The rule of moderation: violence, religion and the politics of restraint in early modern England

Why was it that whenever the Tudor-Stuart regime most loudly trumpeted its moderation, that regime was at its most vicious? This groundbreaking book argues that the ideal of moderation, so central to English history and identity, functioned as a tool of social, religious and political power. Thus The Rule of Moderation rewrites the history of early modern England, showing that many of its key developments – the via media of Anglicanism, political liberty, the development of empire and even religious toleration – were defined and defended as instances of coercive moderation, producing the 'middle way' through the forcible restraint of apparently dangerous excesses in Church, state and society. By showing that the quintessentially English quality of moderation was at heart an ideology of control, Ethan Shagan illuminates the subtle violence of English history and explains how, paradoxically, England came to represent reason, civility and moderation to a world it slowly conquered.

A short history of early modern England: British literature in context

Aims and Acknowledgements vi Quoting from Early Modern Texts ix Illustrations x England s Rulers From Richard II to Charles II xi Timeline of Key Events xii 1 An Overview of Early Modern England 1 2 The Back-Story of the Tudor Dynasty: From Richard II to Henry VII 27 3 Henry VII, Henry VIII, and the Henrician Era (1509 47) 59 4 Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, and Mary I (1547 53) 92 5 The Elizabethan Era (1558 1603) 115 6 The Reign of King James VI/I (1603 25) 149 7 Charles I (1625 42): From Accession to the Beginning of the Civil Wars 181 8 The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the Early Restoration (1642 71) 214 Index 252

THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ROBERT PERSONS'S CONFERENCE IN CONTINENTAL CONTEXT

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to explain some political and theoretical layers of Robert Persons's Conference about the next succession (1595). By examining a Latin manuscript version of the text which appeared in Rome in 1596 and by analysing the context in which this Latin version was composed and the aims which it was intended to fulfil, this article elucidates the political and religious implications of Persons's text, not only in the context of English or British debates over the succession to Elizabeth, but also in a European-wide scenario. Such an approach, I argue, can allow historians of early modern England to gain a deeper and wider understanding of English Catholicism and of its relevance in European political and religious history.

Political Theology and Shakespeare Studies

AbstractThe current focus on political theology in Shakespeare studies is largely devoted to tracing how Shakespeare's dramas illuminate the structural link between religious and political forms in both early modernity and modern liberal democracy. Critics concerned with addressing Shakespeare's engagement with political theology are also interested in how Shakespeare's portrayal of sovereign bodies in crisis constitute an early representation of ‘biopolitics’. These critics draw on theorists ranging from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben to inform their analyses of the way Shakespeare dramatizes sovereignty in a ‘state of emergency’ in his histories and tragedies. Plays such as Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet have drawn particular attention insofar as they vividly interrogate the nature of the sovereign exception and decision highlighted by theorists of political theology. While this line of criticism adds a new theoretical dimension to Shakespeare studies, it also offers the potential for remapping our understanding of the religious and political history of early modern England in its attention to the deforming pressure of religious schism on traditional structures of sovereignty.

Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and Their Cultural Contexts (review)

Reviewed by: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and Their Cultural Contexts Moshe Sluhovsky Philip C. Almond Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x + 405. Philip Almond renders historians of early modern England an important service. This book offers readers modernized versions of nine pamphlets published in England between 1574 and 1650 addressing different aspects of the contemporary interest in diabolic possession and exorcism. The documents range from naive and pseudostraightforward descriptions of events to theological sermons masquerading as reportages. They present Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan points of view, and each text defends a unique theological perspective on the possibility, causes, authenticity, and unfolding of the interaction between this world and the world of the beyond. Thanks to this collection and to three recent editions of early modern English possession tales—Michael MacDonald’s Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London (1991), F. W. Brownlow’s Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (1993), and James A. Sharpe’s The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999)—scholars and students of the religious history of England now have access to a significant body of primary sources available in modern and accessible editions. Almond rightly points out that the “symptoms of possession by evil spirits were sufficiently common to make the diagnosis possible” (p. i), and that relatives and neighbors of allegedly possessed people were the first to suspect the supernatural causality of the strange behaviors that demoniacs presented. They were joined by and sought advice and cure from physicians, astrologers, cunning men and women, and curates. The familiarity with the bodily manifestations and the cultural script of possession did not, however, mean consensus. Both lay individuals and professionals—theologians and physicians—debated all the aspects of possession and exorcism. In general, Catholics maintained the traditional view of their church, according to which diabolic possession was a preternatural occurrence and ordained exorcists had unique powers to expel demons. Anglicans did not deny the possibility of diabolic possession, but were likely to diagnose specific cases as resulting from natural rather than supernatural afflictions. Puritans saw in possession an eschatological sign, and believed in communal means of exorcism—fasting and [End Page 242] prayers by the believers, rather than liturgical adjurations by exorcists, were their proposed remedies. But these generalizations should not lead us to equate the Anglican position with a more scientific or medical approach, or to view the Catholics as more traditional and “superstitious.” Each religious denomination had its share of skeptics, and Catholic, Anglicans, and Puritans alike made use of dramatic possessions and exorcisms to prove the truth of their theological interpretation of scripture. In early modern England, natural and supernatural causalities did not exclude one another; natural affliction could be understood as deriving from satanic intervention; and even an admission of fraud by a would-be demoniac could be found to be of diabolic origins and to reinforce a religious truth. Most of Almond’s documents describe Puritan cases of possession and exorcisms, or the exposure of Puritan impostors. Unfortunately, Almond does not explain in his introduction what criteria he used to choose the texts that found their way into his collection, and whether they reflect the over one hundred possessed persons he had found in contemporary documents. The Anglicans in his collection are presented more often as unveiling Catholic and Puritan frauds and simulations than as practitioners of the cultural resource of possession and exorcism. But is this an accurate reflection of the early modern reality? Could we accept Almond’s conclusion that they “drove an Anglican wedge of secularism between papists and Puritans” (p. 7), or is that a result of Almond’s selection? Furthermore, should we view Anglican skepticism as a “secular” tendency, or rather as a strategy to combat the successes of Puritan and Catholic exorcisms? After all, Anglican alleged secularism in such matters did not include the cessation of witch accusations or of the belief in the power of Satan. The celebrated 1598 case of the exposure of William Sommers as a fraud and the conviction of the Puritan exorcist John Darrell for teaching Sommers how to counterfeit possession...

Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley c.1596-1615

Over the past decade, social historians of early modern England have found themselves drawn to the study of popular politics. Unlike earlier approaches to the subject, which tended to focus upon unitary processes of ‘politicization’, the new social history of politics has developed a broader sense of the political, centred upon power relations, agency and resistance.1 Most notably, this new social history of politics has questioned the validity of older approaches to the political, which tended to present early modern society as an organic hierarchy defined by popular deference and the uncritical acceptance of authority. Thus, Mark Kishlansky’s assumption that ‘in early modern England, political activity took place within the context of a hierarchical social structure and theocentric universe’, and that ‘social relations’ were conducted within ‘complex notions of honour, standing, and deference . . . [which] helped to regulate and absorb conflict between and within loosely defined status groups’ has in recent years been questioned. Whereas Kishlansky believed that early modern society was defined by ‘symbiotic relationships’, the new social historians of politics have emphasized the fluidity of power relations, the contingent nature of deference and the contested relationship between governor and governed.2

:Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England

Historians are usually more intrigued by what was than by what might have been. It is not surprising, then, that a relatively tame Elizabethan puritanism has been deposited within the mainstream of English Protestantism while some radical schemes, or what Peter Kaufman refers to as the what might have been, are more or less overlooked. Thinking of the Laity features fresh evidence that the advocates of broadly participatory parish regimes publicly confronted their critics. It collects shards of the expectations and regrets that survive in a few petitions, in manuscript records of university controversy, and in the recollections of proponents of lay and local control. Kaufman argues that to assemble these fragments is to recover thinking about the laity that gave revolutionary force to late Tudor puritanism. Elizabethan reformers, especially the most outspoken puritans, accused English Catholics of expound[ing] ecclesia to be a state opposite unto, and severed from the laitie. Kaufman concentrates on the identity and aspirations of these reformers who sought to remedy the severing of the church from its people by instituting the extraordinarily controversial solution of lay involvement in parish elections and in disciplining delinquents. Opponents of the reformers perceived the participatory initiatives as a threat to order and clerical authority, and opposed experiments with laicization, democratization, and local control. By the late 1580s the Puritans had lost their fight, but the debate was both lively and public, and as Kaufman deftly and persuasively reminds us, the roads not taken are still important parts of the historic landscape. Thinking of the Laity adds to our understanding of the policy debates closely associated with the origins of puritanism, presbyterianism, and congregationalism. This book will be essential reading for people interested in the history of early modern England and in the progress of sixteenth-century religious reform.

A Prospectus for a “New” Constitutional History of Early Modern England

The study of English constitutional history has fallen on hard times. Once an intellectually thriving field, constitutional history now conjures up visions of bad tweed and bow ties coupled with dryly-legalistic discussions of statutes, charters, parliamentary debates, Year Books, and legal reports. Indeed, whether Whig, Neo-Whig, Revisionist, or Post-Revisionist in orientation, constitutional history has traditionally concerned itself with the “activity of government”; it has emphasized the formal structures of government, their historical origins, their changing composition, their evolving roles, and functions. These formal structures, the Crown, Parliament, the Council, the established church, and the law courts, together constituted the sinews of government. Constitutional controversy arose when the respective roles and functions of these formal structures came into conflict. Accordingly, constitutional historians became experts on the anatomy and development of the particular organs of government and their changing roles yet they were often unable to see the broader conceptual forest in which they were standing. As a result, some critics have lampooned constitutional history and its leading proponents as lacking theoretical engagement and being overly preoccupied with the minutiae of government at the expense of conceptual sophistication and breadth of vision.

WRITING EARLY MODERN HISTORY: IRELAND, BRITAIN, AND THE WIDER WORLD

The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke from this restriction, notably D. B. Quinn, Hugh Kearney, and Aidan Clarke, made significant contributions to the conceptualization of the histories of colonial British America, early modern England, and Scotland. These achievements were challenged by the New British History turn which, for the early modern period, has transpired to be no more than traditional English political history in mufti. None the less, writing on the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and colonial British America has endured and even flourished. Such endeavour has succeeded where the focus has been on people rather than places, where authors have been alert to cross-cultural encounters, where they have identified their subject as part of European or global history, and where they have rejected the compartmentalization of political from social and economic history. The success of such authors should encourage practitioners of both English history and the New British History to follow their examples for the benefit of endeavours which will always be complementary.

England in the 1670s. ‘This masquerading age’. By John Spurr. (A History of Early Modern England.) Pp. xviii+350 incl. 16 ills. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. £50 (cloth), £19.99 (paper). 0 631 19256 5; 0 631 22253 7

England in the 1670s. ‘This masquerading age’. By John Spurr. (A History of Early Modern England.) Pp. xviii+350 incl. 16 ills. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. £50 (cloth), £19.99 (paper). 0 631 19256 5; 0 631 22253 7 - Volume 53 Issue 2

Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. By Keith Wrightson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 372. $35.00.

For almost 20 years now, Professor Wrightson's book English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982) has probably been the most widely used text to introduce the social history of England in this period. But at the same time it is much more than this, in that it presents a powerful argument about change in religious belief, education, social hegemony, and concepts of order, all of which has provoked much scholarly debate. Now Wrightson has produced a volume on the economic history of Britain in the longer period from 1470–1750, which deserves to become as central and as widely read. Its arrival is doubly welcome because, since Christopher Clay's Economic Expansion and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) went out of print some time ago, there has been no current text covering the economic history of early modern England or Britain. In part this unfortunate situation has reflected declining student interest, as economic history became identified with econometrics. But this lucid and engaging work should revive interest in a vitally important subject. As its title indicates, this is economic history with a human face, in which the main focus of analysis is always the social context and meaning of economic change to those whom it affected.

RETHINKING POLITENESS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: MOLL KING’S COFFEE HOUSE AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘FLASH TALK’

HISTORIANS are rightly suspicious of axioms, those capsules of historical ‘truth’ that pass into the received wisdom about a particular time period. Part of our job is to explode historical myth, to scrutinise and re-evaluate existing versions of the past. Yet how hard it is to think outside of the paradigms that are the legacy of an impressive bibliography and a legion of footnotes. I myself became aware of one particular paradigm regarding the cultural history of early modern England in the course of postgraduate research. I found myself straying across one of those temporal boundaries that arises from the chronological fragmentation imposed by textbooks and course syllabuses. In short, I moved from the pre-Civil-War period, with which I was then more familiar, into the early years of the long eighteenth century. It appeared to me that the literary sources from the late 1600s, which were the subject of my doctoral research, had much in common with the popular literature of earlier periods – the almanacs and chapbooks so well described by Bernard Capp, Margaret Spufford and others. The popular press of the last quarter of the seventeenth century seemed familiar territory: monstrous births, providential occurrences, and various forms of advice to young people were as much the staple diet for readers of cheap print in late seventeenth-century London as they had been in the era of Gouge and Whateley. The observation of such continuities had little relevance, however, since the preoccupation of historians studying this later period had changed.