Alexandra Shepard, Phil Withington, ed. Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. xii + 276 pp. $31.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7190-5477-8; $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-5476-1.
Reviewed by Joseph P. Ward (Department of History, University of Mississippi)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2002)
The community study has been, for more than a long generation, one of the hallmarks of social and cultural history, and has been well represented in the work of historians of early modern England. The complexity of the events shaping political, religious, and economic change during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has often sent historians to local sources in an effort to comprehend the causes and consequences of national trends. Recent examples of this approach--such as Muriel McClendon's study of Reformation Norwich, David Underdown's work on seventeenth-century Dorchester, and Daniel Beaver's analysis of parish communities in and around Gloucester--make long-term developments explicable by putting them in human terms while at the same time revealing the diversity and contested nature of early modern communities.
After evaluating the well-established historiography dealing with communities in early modern England, the editors of this volume found that "historians need to reinvigorate the concept" of community "in order to examine the many different types of association and modes of communication in which people participated" (p. 5). They therefore organized a conference on the topic at Oxford in 1998, and subsequently arranged several of the papers presented there into this book. Following an introductory essay by the editors, the volume's twelve chapters are divided into three sections, each of which addresses crucial aspects of what the editors perceive to have been the meaning of community to early modern men and women. The first, "Networks," contains discussions of the place of Sir Stephen Powle in manuscript networks (Jason Scott-Warren), female medical practitioners in London (Margaret Pelling), networks of Catholic dissenters involving the Lancashire gentleman William Blundell (Margaret Sena), and Samuel Pepys's social connections in Restoration London (Ian Archer). The second, "Place," includes studies of belonging in rural parishes (Steve Hindle), criminal communities in London (Paul Griffiths), Restoration citizenship (Phil Withington), and the relationship between community and individualism (Craig Muldrew). The third section, "Rhetoric," addresses the use of the King's English in the mid-Tudor period (Cathy Shrank), the rhetorical "public" (Geoff Baldwin), "town" and "gown" relations in Cambridge (Alexandra Shepard), and the readership of John Houghton's A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (Natasha Glaisyer).
Each of the chapters has something interesting to say about specific social networks in early modern England, but when taken as a whole they add only a limited amount to our understanding of what has been a frequently studied topic. The main impression the book makes is expressed by the use of the plural subject in its title. There were, literally, countless forms of community in early modern England, and individuals could--and almost certainly did--belong to more than one of them at any given time. These are certainly points well worth making, but they can hardly be considered new. The historiography of London, for example, over the last fifteen years has emphasized precisely these points in revealing the many ways that individuals could participate in metropolitan society. The general disregard of the volume's introduction for research on London (has the work of Jeremy Boulton, for example, already been forgotten?) certainly calls into question its reliability as a guide to the field.
Further, the essay format has prevented many of the authors from digging deeply enough into their subjects to allow them to explore adequately the extent to which their particular topic contributes to the project of the book as a whole. The editors maintain that community "was something done as an expression of collective identity by groups of people" (p. 12), but this assertion is undermined by many of the chapters that follow. The editors stress that they wish to retrieve early modern understandings of community, but they offer too little guidance regarding what, precisely, were the necessary markers of the "collective identity" that would enable historians to determine whether or not a social network was, for the participants, a community. Female medical practitioners, criminals, and Samuel Pepys shared a considerable amount of social space and yet it remains very much unclear the extent to which they understood themselves to have belonged to communities of the sort described by other chapters, such as Hindle's work on rural parishes.
Many of the chapters in this volume uncover fascinating aspects of the social and cultural lives of early modern men and women, but they do so in such a way as to fit uneasily between the covers of a book with "communities" on its cover. Sena's essay on Catholicism, for example, concludes quite reasonably that the activities of some of the gentry in maintaining their faith "reveal a religion that resembles less an English Catholic separatist community and more a loosely organized threat to the regime, hindered though it was by the logistical problems of operating under a Protestant regime" (p. 70). How, precisely, does this argument contribute to the aims of the volume? Were all post-Reformation Catholics by virtue of their common experience of life under a Protestant regime sharers in the sort of "collective identity" that the editors are looking for, or were some members of some Catholic networks parts of potentially overlapping communities both within and beyond their local societies because of their conscious efforts to cooperate with like-minded individuals in pursuit of a common goal?
Although it may not have been what the editors intended, this volume serves a useful purpose by displaying the need for scholars concerned with the examination of early modern social and cultural networks to move beyond the study of communities. The volume's preface mentions that Mark Jenner offered a "stimulating refutation of the whole project" at the 1998 Oxford conference. It is a pity that Jenner's observations are not included in this book, for they surely would have gone far toward assessing the current state of this field of research.
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Citation:
Joseph P. Ward. Review of Shepard, Alexandra; Withington, Phil, ed., Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6311
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