Seventeenth-century History Research Articles

Introduction: The Persistence of the “Crisis”

The context for this special issue of the JIH is the persistence in scholarship and teaching of the Crisis as a way of organizing seventeenth-century history. Five historians, specialists in different fields, bring an interdisciplinary perspective to bear as they indicate how fundamental change took place in mid-seventeenth-century economies, demography, politics, art, and popular belief. The realms of warfare, international relations, science, attitudes toward knowledge, and religion also saw profound transformations during this period.

Becoming Turk the Rajput Way: Conversion and Identity in an Indian Warrior Narrative

AbstractThe Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

If You Meet George Herbert on the Road . . . Kill Him! Herbertism and Contemporary Parish Ministry

If You Meet George Herbert on the Road . . . Kill Him!Herbertism and Contemporary Parish Ministry Justin Lewis-Anthony I feel moderately nervous offering such a provocative titled paper. My justification, which I hope you will accept, is that, although my first degree was in seventeenth century history, I am not a professional Herbert scholar, but a mere practitioner of Herbert's last vocation: a parish priest. More precisely, I am a practitioner in the Church of England, an organization which has been deeply and unconsciously influenced by Herbert's life - or rather, and this is the core of my thesis, an organization whose culture is profoundly influenced by an inaccurate memory of the life of George Herbert. Organizational culture, the social scientists tell us, is the way in which every organization deals with questions of meaning: "Why are we here and what are we for?" Thus, "purpose, commitment, and order are generated in an organization both through the feelings and actions of its founder and through the amalgam of beliefs, ideology, language, ritual, and myth we collapse into the label of organizational culture."1 Within the Church of England, the cultural "amalgam" has many and varied roots, including: canon law; Western traditions of theology and religious philosophy; the reality of political establishment and the history of relations with monarchy and parliament; the Church's experiences of industrialization and social change; and the forms of worship used by the Church (lex orandi, lex credendi). The complex network of values and norms can be summed up by this aphorism: In the Roman Catholic Church the source of all authority is the pope; in Protestant Churches the source of all authority is the Bible; in the Church of England the source of all authority is the previous vicar. The Role of Herbert as Ur-Vicar In the Church of England authority is personalized. This authority operates on two levels, of individual minister, and the ecclesial level of the Church's perceived authenticity. Both levels are derived from the [End Page 31] way in which the Church has used the life and ministry of George Herbert. He has been, and continues to be, the exemplar for the English parson. Whether the individual minister is High Church, Low Church, Evangelical, Charismatic, whatever, Herbert is portrayed as the prototype of the parson, poet, teacher, and preacher. He is the saint of Bemerton, the Ur-Vicar, the Echt-Rector. There are at least three reasons for this. First, Herbert's own book, The Country Parson itself, inevitably draws attention to his parochial ministry. From the book we have some idea of how Herbert lived his life, and therefore we may impute both validity and authenticity to his writing. We believe Herbert, in that horrible phrase, "walked the talk." But, as his time in parochial ministry was so short, we inevitably read from the text back into the life. The Country Parson (the book) tells us about the country parson (the person), as it were. For example, Walton tells a touching story of how, one evening walking to a musical soirée in Salisbury, Herbert stopped to help a "poor man with a poorer horse." The parson took off his "canonical coat," reloaded the burdened animal, and became "soiled and discomposed" in the process. He told his friends that such an act of charity "would prove music to him at midnight" and thanked God for the opportunity to comfort a sad soul.2 This has all the hallmarks of an exemplary tale. If it didn't happen, then Herbert was the sort of man to whom it ought to have happened. Second, Herbert died young and in post. This has always been the fast-track to canonization in the folk-religion of the Church of England: if a parson dies in harness then all the guilt and wonder at his vicarious sacrifice transforms into hagiography. Herbert died before his parochial ministry could be compromised; not just by the ructions and turmoil of the English Civil Wars, but also by the regular mundane bruises and accommodations that make up every day life in a community of sinners trying to be saints. It is diverting (although perhaps anachronistically unfair, attempting...

The Scientific Revolution and the Problem of Periodization

Because of its clear-cut and logical narrative structure, the story of the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton is essential to an understanding of the shape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European History. Moreover, the crucial role of scientific discovery in helping to bring about the victory of the ‘moderns’ over the ‘ancients’ in the late seventeenth century provides a central reason for marking this period as the end of the age of the Renaissance. Regardless of problems of definition, therefore, the Scientific Revolution is of crucial importance to the enterprise of organizing the past into distinct and coherent periods.

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music (review)

Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music. Edited by Tim Carter and John Butt. (Cambridge History of Music.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [xxvii, 591 p. ISBN 0-521-79273-8. $175.] References, index. Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury (CHSCM) is part of a new series, Cambridge History of Music, and covers, succinctly enough, music between 1600 and 1700. Edited jointly by Tim Carter and John Butt, two of most imaginative scholars of period, CHSCM consists of fourteen chapters written by twelve scholars (Carter contributes three chapters). It follows Cambridge University Press's rule that no music examples or illustrations occur within volume. This practice is openly addressed in Preface (pp. xviii-xix); its merits and detractions weighed and given their due, but house style remains house style. preface is, along with first chapter (Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, by Carter), a penetrating look at why we have viewed this period way we have (reception history) and how defines what a period is. Beginning with thoughtful comments that challenge reader to consider what a history should contain and questions of objective versus subjective approaches (especially in context of previous writings on period), editors describe how seventeenth century has been discussed in past and also include comments on influence of historical performance and early-music movement. preface ends with statement that one could look to its plurality, unexpectedness, and dynamic combination of conservative and radical elements in search for modes of artistic expression fit for its times. Just how this music stems from a culture that shares some of our proclivities while representing a historically alien world is something that present book must put at centre stage (p. xxvi). Some of exciting contributions to CHSCM are those that do precisely what editors foretell: they offer diversity of approach, they remove historical burden of seventeenth century as a warm-up act to German giants of early eighteenth (p. xvi), and they reflect broader appreciations for aspects of music or musicrelated activities previously seen in writings on nineteenth-century music. first seven chapter titles clearly demonstrate a departure from earlier histories of century: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (as mentioned above); The Seventeenth-Century Musical (by John Butt); Music in Market-Place (by Stephen Rose); Music in New Worlds (by Victor Anand Coelho); Music and Arts (by Barbara Russano Manning); Music and Sciences (by Penelope Gouk); and The Search for Musical Meaning (by Tim Carter). Each of these chapters considers seventeenth century with fresh observation, offering reader not only new information but also new questions. For example, John Butt's The Seventeenth-Century Musical 'Work' asks questions of period that are not traditionally considered and yet illuminate so many of its idiosyncrasies. This approach could serve as a model for other style periods. He warns against dangers of using concepts developed in nineteenth century to judge/define/categorize seventeenth-century music and suggests situating pieces in culture as a whole. Such proposals resonate with anyone who has attempted to discuss this contradictory century, and adjusting basis of our own conception might be most successful way to understand this repertory. (Just how far to take some of ideas presented in book as a whole arise here, for although Butt states that the fact remains, though, that most music-making was still connected to traditional institutions such as church and court (p. 51), Margaret Murata's chapter on secular song (see below) contests even this long-held premise. Therein lies beauty of having such a diverse collection of authors in a single volume. …

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

The Restoration English History Plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery

The two English history plays written by Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, during the first decade of the Restoration, The History of Henry the Fifth and The Black Prince, were instrumental in reviving the genre in the late seventeenth century. Although Boyle's Restoration plays have commonly been understood as inaugurating English heroic drama, this article situates them instead in an enduring tradition of seventeenth-century English history plays. Both complimentary and critical of court policy, these plays respond to the experience of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, from the early enthusiasm for war to the later disappointment with its disastrous outcome. The article aims to demonstrate how later seventeenth-century history plays, like their Elizabethan counterparts, continued to serve as vehicles for political critique and an important forum for the debate of pressing topical issues.

The Reformation of the Dead. Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450-1700

List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Death, Ritual and the Reformation PART ONE: SEPARATING THE LIVING FROM THE DEAD Souls: The Death of Purgatory and the Reformation Bodies: Placing the Dead in the German Reformation PART TWO: THE LUTHERAN FUNERAL RITUAL TO 1700 The Formation of the Lutheran Funeral Ritual Honor and Violence: Funerals in the Confessional Age From Disgrace to Distinction: Nocturnal Burial in Seventeenth Century Germany Death, Ritual and History Index

Taking Paganism Seriously: Anthropology and Antiquarianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Histories of Religion

Taking Paganism Seriously: Anthropology and Antiquarianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Histories of Religion

Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York

was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history. So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an ordinary settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy.Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk. His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions. In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft.

Samson's Death by Theater and Milton's Art of Dying

Samson’s Death by Theater and Milton’s Art of Dying * Dennis Kezar In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending . . . In judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended . . . all the other actions of our life must be tried and tested by this last act. Montaigne, Essais 1 To die is to be counterfeit. Falstaff, 1 Henry IV 2 Breath inward comforts to his heart, and affoord him the power of giving such outward testimonies thereof, as all that are about him may derive comforts from thence, and have this edification, even in this dissolution . . . John Donne, Devotion 17 3 O, Death’s a great disguiser. Vincentio, Measure for Measure 4 In a highly theatrical culture that also invests a great deal of ideological energy in questions of soteriology, one is not surprised to find death privileged as a uniquely authentic and revelatory drama: a faithful picture of “that within” somehow past “show” and unobscured by “actions that a man might play.” 5 But the very inescapability of theater in the Renaissance creates problems of authenticity for the actors of this drama and interpretive anxieties for its spectators. On a stage inhabited by the likes of Falstaff and the first Thane of Cawdor (the latter dying “As one that had been studied in his death”), nothing guarantees that a man will perform his last act with any more authenticity or biographical integrity than mark his countless preceding acts. 6 [End Page 295] Mortal drama does not necessarily provide transparency; its actors might counterfeit and its spectators misconstrue. In Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the medieval advice to the painter may echo with a consummation still devoutly wished in the early modern period: “Give us no more body than shows soul!” 7 But to such a representational theory we must add the interpretive doubts (here voiced by Macbeth’s Duncan) produced by Renaissance theatricality itself: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.” 8 In an effort to keep the theater of death epistemologically viable, the Renaissance did in fact offer many forms of such an art, providing self-representational ground rules for the dying actor and hermeneutic guidelines for the living spectators. Casuistical tracts, consolatory treatises, heavily glossed accounts of the deaths of martyrs and reprobates, and especially the ars moriendi or art of dying literature that provided the period with its ultimate conduct books—all provided theatrical conventions whereby the dying could present themselves as interpretively accessible to the living. For reasons I shall try to make clear, the theatrical conventions of the Renaissance art of dying must be adduced to Milton’s interpretively vexed play if we are to appreciate the historicity of Samson Agonistes’s representation of both dying and the hermeneutics of dying. First, though, I wish to explain why this essay begins by rehearsing the faith and skepticism invited by the Renaissance theater of death and its utterly displayed, yet utterly inscrutable, subject. Recalling this epistemological tension can help us understand not only Milton’s dramatic transactions with seventeenth-century history, but also the central debate shaping Samson Agonistes’s recent and still unfolding critical history. To a degree unmatched by any other Renaissance play, the critical history of Samson Agonistes records a preoccupation with the interpretation of its hero’s death. Manoa’s crucial question, “How died he?” speaks at some level for every interpretation of the play. 9 But if, as I will argue, Milton achieved this interpretive focus by deliberately designing the play to be recognizable as an art of dying, it is less clear that his text presents what the Chorus calls “self-satisfying solution” (SA, 306). After all, Samson Agonistes proves fatal to those spectators who directly witness the event defined as the play’s central interpretive moment. Countless passages, moreover, remind us of the eye’s vulnerability and epistemological limitations: why was the...

Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth

THE CONCEPT OF REPUBLICANISM was one of success stories of 1980s, intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers recently observed, generation ago term-while not unknown-carried no more freight than scores of others historical vocabulary ... By 1990 it was everywhere and organizing everything, though perceptibly thinning out, like a nova entering its red giant phase.1 remarkable spate of recent publications celebrating republicanism-books, articles, collections of essays-suggests that Rodgers has misconstrued astronomical life of this particular star. The wildfire popularity of republicanism continues unabated.2 For scholars interested republicanism, just as for those interested liberalism, seventeenth-century history, politics, and culture hold a special significance. C. B. Macpherson located the roots of liberal tradition ... political theory and practice of seventeenth century. This was because it was in course of a protracted struggle parliament, a civil war, a series of republican experiments, a restoration of monarchy, and a final constitutional revolution, that principles which were to become basic to liberal democracy were all developed. Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock concurred that English Liberalism-which predates but is not conceptually distinguishable from Continental Liberalism-was born out of seventeenth century struggle for freedom of conscience and resistance of Parliament to arbitrary authority of King. More recently, Stephen Holmes has claimed that the early history of liberalism . . . cannot be detached from political history seventeenth and

Crisis and Reformation in a Maritime Kingdom of Southeast Asia: Forces of Instability and Political Disintegration in Western Burma (Arakan), 1603-1701

AbstractThis study of the initial collapse, revival, and finally a resumption of decline in the seventeenth century of the maritime kingdom of Arakan (in western Burma) attempts to establish a special place for Arakan in the general historiography of the seventeenth-century crisis in Southeast Asia. The unusual experience of Arakan in the seventeenth century was in large part due to both the blockades by autonomous Portuguese freebooters in the first two decades of the seventeenth century and the peculiar nature of a new trading relationship from the 1630s until the 1660s between the Arakanese and the Dutch, based on the Arakanese supply of slaves and rice to Dutch port-cities and plantations. The ebb and flow of Arakanese fortunes throughout the century were thus tied to the fortunes of the Dutch. Expanding Asian empires in Bengal and Burma also influenced the decline of the Arakanese maritime polity after the Dutch withdrew from Arakan in the 1660s. Afterwards, as the material resources of the Arakanese central court declined, the Arakanese littoral became politically fragmented, characterized and sustained by the rise of rival political centers and the rebellions of non-Arakanese ethnic groups who had been captured abroad and resettled in the Arakanese littoral. Arakan thus experienced its “own” crisis in the seventeenth century, a watershed that gives it a peculiar niche in the seventeenth-century history not only of Southeast Asia as a whole, but of the mainland in particular.

The English Recusants: Some Mediaeval Literary Links

[This article by the late David Rogers was written in 1982. He later read it as a paper at the English Benedictine Congregation History Symposium at Worth Abbey in 1990 and it was subsequently reproduced in typescript as part of the proceedings. The article demands a wider audience and permission to publish it in ‘Recusant History’ has been kindly granted by Dom Gregory Scott O.S.B. and by the Friends of the Bodleian, who hold the copyright in David Rogers's work. A section of the article was elaborated and published as ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’ in G.A.M. Janssens & F.G.A.M. Aarts (eds.): ‘Studies in Seventeenth Century English Literature, History and Bibliography’, Amsterdam, 1984]:

The Port-Royal Logic's Theory of Argument

This is a critical examination of Antoine Arnauld's Logic or the Art of Thinking (1662), commonly known as the Port-Royal Logic. Rather than reading this work from the viewpoint of post-Fregean formal logic or the viewpoint of seventeenth-century intellectual history, I approach it with the aim of exploring its relationship to that contemporary field which may be labeled informal logic and/or argumentation theory. It turns out that the Port-Royal Logic is a precursor of this current field, or conversely, that this field may be said to be in the same tradition.

Scott's "character" of Buckingham in Peveril of the Peak, XXVIII: dialogism, speech/writing, and law

Using Bakhtin's categories of dialogism and intonation, and the speech/writing distinction as elaborated upon by contemporary theorists such as Derrida, to examine Scott's de facto "character" of Buckingham in Peveril of the Peak, XXVIII, illuminates not merely the power relations determining the characterization of Buckingham in Scott's novel but the novel's preoccupation with law and justice as notionally structuring later Caroline England. Studying Scott's presentation of Buckingham in those terms also illuminates the intertextual relations among Dryden, Burnet, and Scott in the fashioning of one of the novel's major characters. Through the characterization of Buckingham, newly understood via Bakhtin's categories and the speech/writing distinction, one can more accurately appreciate how Peveril of the Peak contributes to Scott's almost programmatic attempt, in his novels concerned with seventeenth-century British history, to rehabilitate the Stuart monarchy.

The rise and fall of revolutionary England: an essay on the fabrication of seventeenth-century history

Preface - Introduction - The Great Bourgeois Revolutions: A False Genealogy? - Reclaiming the Revolution - Bourgeois Revolutions and Peoples' Wars - Marxist History in a Cold War Era -Saving Appearances - Levelling Out the Revolution - Retreating from the Revolution - Revolution as Text and Discourse - Conclusion: The End of the Line? - Endnotes - Index

“Barbarous Dissonance” and Multivocality in Paradise Lost

BARBAROUS DISSONANCE” AND MULTIVOCALITY IN PARADISE LOST E L IZ A B E T H S A U E R Brock University one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equality, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv’d Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth; Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) With War and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous: A mighty Hunter thence he shall be styl’d Before the Lord, as in despite of Heav’n, Or from Heav’n claiming second Sovranty; And from Rebellion shall derive his name, Though of Rebellion others he accuse. (PL 12.24-37) A solo voice sings not in harmony by silencing the rest. (Eva Figes, The Tree of Knowledge, 80) I T h e many Renaissance and seventeenth-century histories of Nimrod and the fall of Babel offer literary and political contexts for examining representa­ tions of voice and of multivocality. In an extraliterary context, monarchists of the seventeenth century appropriated the image of the tower of Babel to characterize the multiplicity of sects, the revolutionary movement, and the many-headed monster of democracy — Spenser’s Blatant Beast. The ca­ cophonous voices resounded in a society that for the first time gave rise to public opinion,1 pamphlet literature, and political parties, and that chal­ lenged censorship and the monarchical control of government and history. John Milton added his voice to the historical conversations through his ap­ peals for republicanism in his political pamphlets and through his orches­ tration of narrative voices in his literary texts. In Paradise Lost, specifi­ cally, Milton established a community of narrators, and thereby proposed E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , 19, 3, S e p te m b e r 1993 the imaginative possibility for further intervention and interplay in the au­ thorized conversations outside of the poem. Instead of advocating a return to an original language or a former state of edenic innocence, the poet offered a portrait of a multivocal society as a creative ferment for the development of a new republic.2 The treatment and authority of voice3 in the third and fourth proems of Paradise Lost and in the book 12 account of Nimrod is my main consider­ ation in the opening section of this paper. In section II, I examine several other accounts of the fall of Babel, composed by Milton’s predecessors and contemporaries; and in the final section, I characterize some of the poetic and political alternatives that Milton presents in place of the censoring “neg­ ative voice” of monarchy (Prose, Eikonoklastes 3: 501, 3: 579). The poet invites a political reading of the story of Babel through the inclusion of the unnamed Nimrod in Paradise Lost. Francis Blackburne claims that the Nimrod passage is reported to have “always been supposed to allude to . . . [Milton’s] own times” (2: 622). In the epic, Nimrod is portrayed as the post-lapsarian world’s first monarch, who declares his dissatisfaction with fair equality and fraternal state, and who, by imposing a self-serving unifica­ tion on a pastoral society, becomes responsible for the confusion of tongues. In attempting to make a name for himself through the construction of the tower of Babel, Nimrod is destined to remain nameless and powerless. Bab­ ble resounds through time in the place of his own name, and the unfinished tower testifies to his failed political control. Condemning the tyranny of the monarchical and monological voice of Nimrod, Milton indicates that political systems can justly be subject to criticism and ultimately reconstructed. The poet-revolutionary thereby legitimizes the notions of a mixed government, national consciousness, and a multivocal society — created in part through the dissemination of language — as cures for rather than causes of social fragmentation. He assists in fostering the novel idea that multivocality and diversity should be expected and tolerated rather than being regarded as regrettable lapses from the one true standard of rectitude. Paradise Lost, I suggest, enacts the process of its own development and that of...

:Illuminated and Decorated Medieval Manuscripts in the University Library, Utrecht. An Illustrated Catalogue

Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 315, hb. £55.00, ISBN: 9780199274444James Ussher (1581-1656) was, as Alan Ford has shown, a man 'delicately poised', between Ireland and England, between loyalty to his king and defence of the godly cause, and between academic scholarship and public proselytizing. And Ussher was well cut out for such a role, for he was a moderate, tactful man, influential Archbishop, and world-class scholar. In this new study of Ussher, Ford explains how history, theology and politics interacted in the career and the thought of the Irish Primate, within the broader context of early seventeenth-century British history. It comes at a good time for students of early modern Ireland; it complements well John MacCafferty's recent The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland (2007) on Bishop John Bramhall and the other side, as it were, of Irish church politics in the 1630s. Yet Ford's work is in no way limited to the Irish scene and sheds much light, not only on Ussher himself but on the Irish and English world in which the hero lived.Ford begins by sketching the state of Irish Protestantism in Ussher's youth, where the dominant theology was Calvinist. Like its theology, the personnel of the Church of Ireland were largely imported, with most of the Irish clergy migrating from England. With the foundation of Trinity College in 1591, it became possible for the Irish church to set about producing her own clergy and establishing her own intellectual foundations and identity, and to these causes Ussher would contribute with lasting effect. The most pressing need was to defend the Church against her greatest enemy, and Ussher's scholarly writings constitute a vigorous assertion of Protestantism against the Catholic Church. This was an enterprise common to Protestants across Europe but adapted by Ussher for his Irish readers and laced with strong doses of apocalypticism. Furthermore, Ussher's scholarship served to create and then to reinforce the independent identity of the Church of Ireland, not least by providing her with a serviceable history. Ussher spent much intellectual effort showing that the earliest Irish Christians kept their distance from Rome and from any doctrine of justification by works - a proposition which was highly significant for his contemporaries. Ussher did not, of course, only operate from the within the academy. He played a leading role in drafting the Irish Articles of 1615, articles which embodied the Calvinist consensus then prevailing in both England and protestant Ireland. Once he was appointed bishop of Meath and then archbishop of Armagh he sought to defend the kind of religious vision outlined in those articles, against the growing threats of Arminianism and Laudianism. Ford shows that Ussher particularly feared the divisions between Protestants which such a new religious stance would bring in its wake, and the diversion of effort from the crusade against Catholicism. …

Legislation, Foreign Policy, and the “Proper Business” of the Parliament of 1624

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.