Receptions and Re-visitings

Receptions and Re-visitings: Review Articles, 1978-2011The shorter pieces reproduced here are drawn chiefly from the author’s large output of review articles and reviews of the last fifteen years. Though there is some shared subject matter with R.C. Richardson’s new collection on Social History, Local History and Historiography (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), this volume significantly enlarges the range of the other in addressing, for example, issues relating to politics and political thinking, London, gendered worlds, servants and servant-keeping, the writing of diaries, and early modern reading habits. Many of the essays have a pronounced historiographical dimension, and a number of them focus on the period of the English Revolution. The two final essays – on ‘Epic Historiography’ and ‘Historians, History Brokers and English Historical Culture’ – extend the coverage to modern times. General readers, not just specialists, will find this book a helpful and accessibly written guide to the subjects under review.Social History, Local History, and Historiography: Collected EssaysThis wide-ranging volume collects together twelve of the author’s longer essays, mainly drawn from those first published in the last two decades. Chiefly consisting of micro-studies of a variety of different aspects of early modern English history, the book concerns itself with social and economic change, the period of the English Revolution and its long-lasting impact, with Puritanism, with the family as a social institution, and with historical consciousness and different forms of historical writing. Some of the essays focus on a particular individual, not all well known – William Camden, John Milner, and Ralph Dutton – to open up a broader theme. One boldly attempts a comparison over three centuries of the evolution of local history as a subject on both sides of the Atlantic. Two other essays reach out into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but do so with echoes of the subject matter of some of those dealing with the early modern period. The inter-connectedness of social history, local history, and historiography is stressed and illustrated throughout. Both specialists and non-specialists will find much to interest them in this varied and rewarding volume.