England in Conflict 1603-1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth

Description

This volume tells the story of the disintegration of the early modern polity. By questioning the meanings of the body politic - a metaphor too often taken for granted - it is able to bridge not only the high and low but also divergent approaches to the period. Its opening explorations of the practices and assumptions of politics, of religious life in centre and locality, of social relationships and economic patterns, are followed by a turn to narrative. This is a narrative that attends to the discordant voices even as it situates the actors in their contexts, and assesses their responses.

Derek Hirst is William Eliot Smith Professor of History at Washington University, St. Louis. In addition to Authority and Conflict, he is the author of Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (1975) and numerous essays on the history and literature of the seventeenth century.

Authority and Conflict' was one of the most informed, balanced and - especially on the 1640s and 1650s - most enriching of early modern survey books. Building on the foundations of that book, Derek Hirst has now enhanced and broadened the account in ways that make 'England in Conflict' as much a book for the first decade of the next millennium as 'Authority and Conflict' was a book for the 1980s. John Morrill, Professor of British and Irish Histo A superb book a very rewarding "must" for all those who seek to understand England 1603-1660. Jenny Wormald, C.E. Hodge Fellow and Tutor in Mode