England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context

by Jonathan Scott

Overview

Seventeenth-century English history is known best for "the English Civil War" and "the English Revolution." This highly original and wide-ranging study analyzes and explains both of these major historical events, and others, by setting them in their wider contexts in relation to political instability across the century; in relation to the history of religions and political ideas; and in relation to contemporary European events.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521411929
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/25/2000
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.38(d)
Lexile:	1520L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction: experience other than our own; 1. The shape of the seventeenth century; Part I. England's Troubles, 1618–89: Political Instability: 2. Taking contemporary belief seriously; 3. The unreformed polity; 4. Reformation politics (1) 1618–41; 5. Counter-reformation England; 6. Reformation politics (2) 1637–6; 7. Restoration memory; 8. Restoration crisis 1678–83; 9. Invasion 1688–9; Part II. The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination: 10. The shape of the English Revolution; 11. Radical reformation (1): the power of love; 12. Radical reformation (2): outward bondage; 13. Radical renaissance (1): after monarchy; 14. Radical renaissance (2): republican moral philosophy and the politics of settlement; 15. Radical restoration (1): the subjected plaine; 16. Radical restoration (2): the old cause; Part III. Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding: 17. Restoration process; 18. First restoration 1660–78; 19. 'Second Restauration' 1679–85; 20. Third restoration 1688–94; 21. Anglo-Dutch statebuilding.

Editorial Reviews

"Breathtaking in its scope, magisterial in its thesis...The work is magnificent and will spark widespread discussion for a very long time." Richard L. Greaves, Florida State University

"Shot through with brilliance and an extraordinarily powerful historical intelligence...I have been excited, challenged and awed by much that I have read." John Morrill, University of Cambridge

"We have had no interpretative synthesis as original or as comprehensive since Hill's Century of Revolution...The elegance and sweep of Scott's approach really deserves to make the book a focus of discussion for all early modernists." Glenn Burgess, University of Hull

"A work of unsurpassed imagination, unrelenting originality and unabashed boldness...It is brimming with originality and stuffed with insights that make it the most stimulating book on seventeenth-century history to have appeared in years, if not decades." Times Literary Supplement

"...this volume willprove a seminal study in reconceiving Stuart political history." American Historical Review

From the Publisher

In a bold attempt to put the fragmented seventeenth century back together, by crossing the traditional 1660 divide and by negotiating all the recent historiographical fractures, Scott pursues the persistent causes of instability which predated and post-dated, as well as caused, the revolution. At their core he identifies the problem of a weak monarchy and state facing new threats from abroad and confessional divisions at home.

England's Troubles is in some respect a curious book. Neither textbook survey nor research monograph, it is really a long interpretative essay, if that genre can run to 500 pages. Yet this is a book full of acute criticisms, new emphases, apt and fresh quotations (from Marvel and Dryden as much as Locke) and rich insights which repay the reader's effort. Scott offers a stimulating panorama of the whole seventeenth century, the first 'large scale explanatory analysis' that takes us beyond the attenuated and sterile debates over revisionism.
—History Today

Kevin Sharpe