The experience of revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland
By: [edited by] Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780521868969
Subjects: Military History; HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain; Religion and state; History
Description: "This volume ranges widely across the social, religious and political history of revolution in seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland, from contemporary responses to the outbreak of war to the critique of the post-regicidal regimes; from royalist counsels to Lilburne's politics; and across the three Stuart kingdoms. However, all the essays engage with a central issue - the ways in which individuals experienced the crises of mid seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland and what that tells us about the nature of the Revolution as a whole. Responding in particular to three influential lines of interpretation - local, religious and British - the contributors, all leading specialists in the field, demonstrate that to comprehend the causes, trajectory and consequences of the Revolution we must understand it as a human and dynamic experience, as a process. This volume reveals how the understanding of these personal experiences can provide the basis on which to build up larger frameworks of interpretation"--

"When John Morrill began his research career the most influential writing about mid-seventeenth-century England was essentially concerned with modernization, and, even in non-Marxist explanations, contained a strong strain of materialism. This was a prominent feature of the sometimes vituperative exchanges of the gentry debate, and John's first piece of extended writing about seventeenth-century England was written in response to that controversy; it was a long essay, composed during a summer vacation, which examined the relationship between the fortunes of particular gentry families and their Civil War allegiance. His interest in local realities, however, quickly gave rise to dissatisfaction with the broad categories of analysis with which the gentry controversy was engaged. By the time that he published the monograph based on his Oxford D.Phil. thesis, in 1974, he concluded (among other things) that 'the particular situation in Cheshire diffracted the conflicts between King and Parliament into an individual and specific pattern. As a result all rigid, generalized explanations, particularly of the socio-economic kind, are unhelpful if not downright misleading.' A desire to do better than these generalizations has driven his work ever since, and has thereby provided a huge stimulus to scholars of early modern England. His doctoral study of Cheshire marked the beginning of the first of three overlapping but distinct phases in the development of his work, in each of which he has been a leading figure. All have been a point of reference for the work of numerous scholars engaged in a critical reappraisal of the Whig and Marxist traditions. In his first phase, as a local historian"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: JSM : a tribute to a friend Mark / A. Kishlansky; title: Introduction : John Morrill and the experience of revolution / Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith /  The Scottish-English-Romish book : the character of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 / Joong-Lak Kim; title: Popery in perfection? : The experience of Catholicism : Henrietta Maria between private practice and public discourse / Dagmar Freist; title: Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and England's "wars of religion" / David L. Smith; title: Rhetoric and reality : images of Parliament as Great Council / James S. Hart, Jr; title: Cathedrals and the British Revolution / Ian Atherton; title: History, liberty, reformation and the cause : Parliamentarian military and ideological escalation in 1643 / Michael J. Braddick; title: Sacrilege and compromise : court divines and the king's conscience, 1642-1649 / Anthony Milton; title: Law, liberty, and the English Civil War : John Lilburne's prison experience, the Levellers and freedom / D. Alan Orr; title: On shaky ground : Quakers, Puritans, possession and high spirits / Tom Webster; title: James Harrington's prescription for healing and settling / Jonathan Scott; title: "The Great Trappaner of England" : Thomas Violet, Jews and crypto-Jews during the English Revolution and at the Restoration / Ariel Hessayon; title: The Cromwellian legacy of William Penn / Mary K. Geiter; title: Irish bishops, their biographers and the experience of revolution, 1656-1686 / John McCafferty; title: Religion and civil society : the place of the English Revolution in the development of political thought / Glenn Burgess.