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Periodization, Politics, and “The Social”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Peter Lake
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Type
Symposium: Controlling (Mis)Behavior
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 3: Controlling (Mis)Behavior: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives , July 1998 , pp. 279 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1998

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References

1 See, e.g., for the rise of the modern state, Elton, Geoffrey, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the rise of protestantism, Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London, 1972)Google Scholar; the process of secularization, Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1970)Google Scholar; the rise of capitalism, Hill, Christopher, Puritanism and Society in Pre-revolutionary England (London, 1964)Google Scholar; and of individualism (both affective and acquisitive), Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977)Google Scholar; and Hill, Puritanism and Society.

2 Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Davies, C. S. L., Peace Print and Protestantism (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Starkey, D., The English Court (London, 1987)Google Scholar, and see particularly his “Which Age of Reform?” in Revolution Reassessed, ed. Coleman, C. and Starkey, D. (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Bernard, G., ed., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992)Google Scholar; Gunn, S., Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (London, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Spufford, M. ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

5 MacFarlane, A., The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 See Bernard's introduction to The Tudor Nobility; Hicks, M., Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

7 Clarke, J. C. D., English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar, and Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

8 On this, see the very pertinent remarks in Vickery, A., “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also see Rachel Weil's forthcoming book Gender, the Family and Political Argument in Late Stuart England, especially the conclusion. Also relevant is Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, a stimulating book and an essential read for early modernists in which Vernon shunts many of the changes and transitions associated with the reform of popular culture and the emergence of the public sphere forward into the second half of the nineteenth century when, at least if we are to believe him, the door of the prison house of a now distinctly Foucauldian modernity finally slammed shut.

9 Hill, Puritanism and Society; Wrightson, K. and Levine, D., Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Spufford, M., “Puritanism and Social Control?” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Fletcher, A. and Stevenson, J. (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

11 McIntosh, M., Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

12 For examples of recent attempts to do so using the unit of the gentry family and its local, regional, and national contacts or the issue of military administration and aristocratic power as mediated through the lieutenancy see, respectively, Eales, J., Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the Civil War (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Stater, V., Noble Government: The Stuart Lord Lieutenancy and the Transformation of English Politics (Athens, Ga., 1994)Google Scholar; and Cogswell, Tom, Home Divisions, forthcoming from Manchester University Press in 1998Google Scholar.

13 Elton, G. R., The Parliament of England (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; Graves, M., The Tudor Parliaments (London, 1985)Google Scholar; and for a sample of post-Eltonian studies along these lines see Dean, D. and Jones, N., The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar.

14 Brewer, J., The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1793 (New York, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 This was certainly the case in the classic statement of the localist interpretation by Everitt, Alan, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–60 (Leicester, 1966)Google Scholar, the insights and claims of which were applied more broadly by the next generation of “county community” historians. See, e.g., Morrill, John, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

16 Not quite for the first time, of course, since ironically it has been the historian, whose work has been most influential and effective in disrupting the interpretation of the politics and gentry culture of the period in terms of a county community based localism, who has done most to set localist sentiment and language in precise polemical, institutional, and political contexts. See Hughes, A. L., “Militancy and Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminister Politics,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981): 51–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and her “The King, Parliament and the Localities during the English Civil War,” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 236–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 On this question, see Cogswell, T., “A Low Road to Extinction? Supply and Redress of Grievances in the Parliaments of the 1620s,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 283–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and also his forthcoming Home Divisions.

18 The most significant of which is Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

19 I am thinking here particularly of Collinson, Patrick, Birthpangs of Protestant England (London, 1988)Google Scholar and the tensions and contradictions set up between his rendition of the social and political resonances of “the religion of protestants” developed there as against those laid out in his earlier book of that title, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

20 I am paraphrasing and developing here the argument of my “Defining Puritanism Again?” in Puritanism, ed. Bremer, Frank (Boston, 1993)Google Scholar.

21 Bossy, J., “Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim,” Past and Present, no. 95 (1982): 3–18Google Scholar, and Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars.

22 Such considerations, of course, call into the most serious question the validity of interpretations of postreformation English Catholicism that privilege continuity. See Haigh, C., “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,” Past and Present, no. 93 (1981): 37–69Google Scholar. I should like to thank Michael Questier for many discussions on this and related points.

23 Bossy, Christianity in the West; Brigden, S., “Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth Century London,” Past and Present, no. 103 (1984): 67–112Google Scholar.

24 We can do so, moreover, without buying into any overarching metanarrative of “secularization.” On the contrary we might think of ourselves with Bossy as dealing not so much with the decline of some unitary thing we can unproblematically label “religion” as with, in Bossy's resonant phrase, a series of “migrations of the holy,” or what we might term a series of transactions and transfers between the social and the holy. See Bossy, Christianity in the West, esp. chap. 8.