Barry Coward, ed. A Companion to Stuart Britain. Blackwell Companions to British History Series. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. xxiv + 564 pp. $131.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-631-21874-6.
Reviewed by Victor Stater (Louisiana State University)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2004)
The History of Everything
The History of Everything
Perhaps the only thing more difficult than editing this volume is reviewing it: twenty-five essays (counting Barry Coward's introduction) by twenty-five authors covering subjects ranging from literature and the arts to empire, economy, and politics insure that a conscientious reviewer will strain his word-limit and tax his critical abilities. In this case, however, the added toil has been well worth it.
This book is part of a series sponsored by the Historical Association that, when complete, will cover every period of British history from the Roman period forward. The goal of each volume is to allow scholars expert in the field the opportunity to describe our current understanding of their subject and its historiography, as well as to suggest directions for future research. For the busy scholar in need of a quick refresher on the state of play in an area outside his or her own field, or the graduate student preparing for general examinations, these books could be extremely useful. It is an ambitious project, requiring an ability to synthesize vast quantities of material and the skills of a soothsayer. The authors here have accepted this challenge and most rise to the occasion.
Coward has organized the volume in five parts; the first two are thematic, covering Britain and the wider world, government and popular opinion, gender, crime, economy, art and literature, and science. The remaining three parts deal with religion, politics, and political thought chronologically, taking the Stuart accession, the outbreak of the civil wars, and the revolution of 1688 as key turning points. The authors of each essay tend to fall into one of two camps: those who keep their focus upon the historiography of their subject, and those for whom the subject itself is most important, and for whom the details of historical debate is less important. Obviously some subjects lend themselves far more readily to the historiographical treatment than others. Michael Hunter's excellent survey here of the "science wars" is a gem, summarizing the arguments of scholars in the field and suggesting the strengths and weaknesses of their accounts. Similarly, David Smith's essay on politics from 1603 to 1642 and Tom Webster's on religion in the same period deal with an extraordinarily complex and contentious historiography. All three of these authors negotiate these debates skillfully while making some valuable observations of their own--for example, Smith's more positive assessment of James I's political role (one not shared, incidentally, by Webster in his study of the king's leadership of the church). Perhaps the best of the historiographically oriented essays here is Ian Atherton's masterful treatment of popular opinion and the press (chapter 5). He has written a thought-provoking and carefully considered summary of current debates on the subject--the extension of Habermas's "public sphere" into the seventeenth century being one of the more lively ones--and added his own very persuasive views of the implications of a growing press and its influence. To this he has added an excellent full bibliography, allowing interested readers quick access to the most important works in the field.
Other authors here are working in fields where the historiographical booby traps are more rare. Michael Braddick, writing on the rise of the fiscal state, deals with a subject he has made his own in recent years, following in the pioneering footsteps of Henry Roseveare, Frederick Dietz, and John Childs. The same might be said of John Spurr's and John Miller's essays on the Restoration Church and politics. Miller and Spurr's own insights have been so important that they have won widespread acceptance among historians; here they provide us with admirable distillations of their previous work. The student or scholar looking for a brief overview could hardly be better served.
Some subjects have attracted scholarly attention only fairly recently, and so have a less-well-developed literature to explore. Allan Macinnes and Toby Barnard, writing about Britain and the wider world, demonstrate that while their subject might be relatively new--the "new British history" being the current modish phrase--it is nevertheless an important one, and one which has generated a great deal of lively debate. Coward's editorial decision to place these chapters first, along with Nicholas Canny's essay on Asia and the Atlantic, hint at the significance these subjects have assumed for historians lately. Elizabeth Foyster's chapter on gender is also a fruitful discussion of a subject whose recent advent has offered many exciting new opportunities to look at old questions from a fresh perspective: taking gender into account when we consider Stuart politics, for example. She also suggests areas where we need to know more: not least, the role of Anglican women in religion.
Many of the essays in this book offer useful suggestions and ideas for the way forward. Steven Hindle, in his study of crime and popular protest, describes recent challenges to the long-standing "moral economy" thesis propounded by E. P. Thompson and calls for what he describes as "micro-sociologies of power" through detailed local studies (p. 143). Both J. C. Davis and Justin Champion, writing about political thought from the mid-century until the end of the period, advocate the "de-canonization" of the field; we will, they argue, gain a better understanding of the period if we focus more on the hack writers, journalists, and propagandists who flourished during the latter half of the Stuart century than we have by focusing upon Filmer, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke.
Coward's authors cover nearly every base, and most do their job well. Thomas Corns's account of literature and theory and Tim Wilks on art and architecture will be extremely helpful to historians who want to understand how the arts played a role in the politics and history of the Stuart age, though Corns's essay would have benefitted from a conclusion tying together the complicated threads of his argument. Most of the essays do a good job of grounding the reader in current literature, providing bibliographies citing the most important works in the field. Here some are more thorough than others: Atherton's, Hindle's, and Macinnes's, for example, are particularly valuable, while a few others, such as Canny's and Ann Hughes's (an otherwise superb essay on religion between 1642 and 1660) seem rather perfunctory. In any event, the whole volume is blessed with an excellent bibliography that will be a great help for readers in search of more detail. Most of the authors who contributed to the volume are well-known specialists in their field and some, like Hughes, Canny, Miller, and Braddick, might rightly be called pre-eminent. There is a missing element, however: that contentious school of historians usually described as "revisionists." Revisionism comes in for a good deal of comment in some of the articles, as in David Smith's on early Stuart politics, David Scott's on the Civil War, and Macinnes's on the "British problem." Most of this comment is critical--Jason Peacey's essay on the outbreak of the civil wars, for instance, takes Conrad Russell's work as a principal target. The impression that emerges suggests that revisionism is, if not wholly dead, at least in terminal decline--an impression that might not be wholly correct.
There are a few minor editorial problems with the work; the mysterious appearance of a word that I can find in no dictionary, namely "outwith" (pp. 12, 13, 265), for example, and Craig Muldrew's rather odd assertion that in 1603 bread prices in London "fell 100 percent from their great height in 1596" (p. 148). James I was known for his liberality, but free bread for all the people of London was one wheeze even he never thought of. Apart from these picayune matters, the Companion to Stuart Britain is well produced, and benefits from an excellent bibliography and index. Scholars and students searching for thoughtful and comprehensive treatments of the issues and historiography of the Stuart age could hardly ask for a better collection.
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Citation:
Victor Stater. Review of Coward, Barry, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8722
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