Well, I’ve started the MA! I had my induction earlier this week and seminars start in earnest next week. It’s been interesting returning to a university environment. Even just walking through the faculty door, there is a certain buzzy atmosphere that you just don’t get in a workplace. It was a feeling I’d almost forgotten, but suffice it to say I am incredibly excited to have started.
The first term is a thematic look at big issues in early modern historiography. Although the course is European in scope, the first thing we’re looking at is revisionism in British history, so I’ve been having fun going through some of the key flashpoints of the revisionist and post-revisionist debates in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Gavin’s posts on the debates over the causes of the English/British civil wars over at Investigations of a Dog have been rather helpful for this, and if you haven’t seen them I would recommend them.
The article I’ve picked to post about is Glenn Burgess’s classic piece in the Historical Journal about the nature of revisionism – partly because it’s a classic, but also because you can download it for free from the HJ website at the moment.
Burgess argues that the chief work done on the early Stuart period in the immediate post-war period was essentially an attempt to add a socio-economic dimension to S.R. Gardiner’s high political narrative – whether this came out in a Whiggish or Marxist style. However, it ran into the sand over the difficulties in connecting social trends with political trends. The storm over the gentry is the classic example of this, although you could argue that fizzled out more because of the unreliability of the evidence as it was than because of the irreducible complexity of linking these two themes. Still, this is a helpful starting point. And it reminds us that despite the tendency for some “revisionists” – I use the term in inverted commas for reasons I’ll set out below – to automatically label their predecessors, and even contemporaries as Whigs, there wasn’t a “Whig consensus” waiting to be smashed. The debate between Trevor-Roper and Stone over the gentry, for example, was just as heated as later debates over puritanism, or the extent of oppositional ideologies in the 1630s and 1640s.
Burgess is also helpful on trying to unpick what revisionism actually means, and whether it can be called a movement, ideology or methodology of sorts. Some of the characteristics often picked out and ascribed to the movement include rejection of long-term causes in favour of contingency, replacement of ideology with faction, and rejection of teleology. Burgess convincingly argues that although many revisionist historians do favour a more “accidental” explanation, many also pick out long-term factors or preconditions. He also points to the interest of many (eg Kevin Sharpe) in ideology. As for teleology, he makes the helpful distinction between “weak” teleology – writing with a certain end point in mind, for the purposes of narrative, which all historians have to live with – and “strong” teleology, which assumes an inevitable outcome of a set of events. It’s certainly true that many revisionists have accused colleagues of being teleological without quite understanding this distinction.
So if revisionism wasn’t a set ideology, was it a uniform group? Not really. Burgess looks at the example of Derek Hirst, who for many trailblazed a revisionist, even post-revisionist approach to parliamentary studies, only to be called a Whig by Mark Kishlanksy, who in turn was called a Whig by John Adamson. Generationally and temperamentally, as well as in research interests, there is a big gap between these three, and yet despite the name-calling amongst themselves they have all been labelled revisionists. And the pejorative nature of the terms doesn’t help – revisionist as much as Whig started as a pejorative term used by critics. If we’re going to follow the revisionists’ advice and use terms as contemporaries understood them, maybe we should abandon the use of the terms altogether as a methodological descriptor of how historians operate.
And yet this almost reduces revisionism to nothing. It reminds me of John Morrill’s famous (and misunderstood) quip that his old history teacher said to him, after reading Revolt of the Provinces, that he had explained why the civil wars didn’t happen! But clearly something happened during the 1970s and 1980s to overturn many of the assumptions of the post-war period, even if there was no organised movement as such. There are some who have seen it as a general reaction to the 1960s liberal consensus, linked to Thatcherism. However, I’m always suspicious of arguments about the “general intellectual mood”. They seem to me just too hard to link to actual results. Ronald Hutton has a couple of more interesting possible causes. One is the growth and subsequent contraction of the historical profession during the 1960s/70s then the 1980s – first there was an expansion in the number of historians around to challenge the traditional “big guns”, then competition to publish and make a mark expanded as jobs got scarcer. The second is the increased availability of county archives during the 1960s. This certainly explains the surge of interest in county studies that resulted in the so-called “county community” school inspired by Alan Everitt. And it explains, up to a point, the ability to bring fresh sources to bear on established “facts” that, in many cases, resulted in long-cherished explanations being abandoned. Both these points are interesting in that they explain why a re-examination of this period started, without trying to claim that it coalesced into a movement – as an explanation it leaves room for the wide spectrum of reviews within “revisionism”.
The other interesting point Hutton brings out is that some of the significant players in the revisionism debate were either American, or held academic posts there at key points in their career. Thus, it was an “Atlantic” debate over the period rather than just one amongst British academics. He doesn’t, however, really draw out the significance of this. Was there something peculiar to US teaching or methodologies that helped to spark off the re-examination of this period? Or is it just a coincidence? I don’t know, but it would be interesting to pursue.
With that, I must get ready to head off to the library – I’ve got more reading to do…
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6 October 2007 at 9:50 am
lered141939980
I was and am one of those early modern historians present at the birth of what has been denominated as ‘revisionism’, a term first employed by Ted Rabb. It is important to be clear about what is being discussed. The old ‘Whig’ interpretation of early Stuart Parliamentary history had, in fact, already been overturned and repudiated in John Ball’s Cambridge Ph.D. of 1954 on the career of Sir John Elliot between 1624 and 1629 and much more significantly in J.H.Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, first published in Encounter in 1956 and then reproduced with apparatus in his 1961 collection of essays, Reappraisals in History. If you look at Pages 134-138 of that book, you will see there a denial of the claim that there was a struggle for sovereignty between Stuart monarchs and the House of Commons: instead, he argued that the gentry of England tried to define the conditions and terms upon which the existing supreme authority might be exercised. He also maintained that the House of Commons tried to defend the rights and liberties not of a privileged section of the population but of English people as a whole. If that was ‘Whiggery, then Hexter pleaded guilty. I personally pointed out to Conrad Russell that the Whig framework for Parliamentary history had been dissolved before he published his essay on Parliamentary history in perspective. His assault on what every school boy or master allegedly knew was superfluous: academic history had moved on a considerable distance before 1975.
Where the revision of early Stuart history began was in a reaction against the assumptions of R.H.Tawney and of Lawrence Stone, particularly in his book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, that economic and social history of the kind they had written offered an explanation for the political history of the period, which was, according to them, already well understood. Even a cursory inspection of the sources for Parliamentary history, showed that the works of S.R.Gardiner, Wallace Notestein, D.H.Willson, Harold Hulme and others were hopelessly inadequate. Nicholas Tyacke’s work on Arminianism offered a wholly new approach to the religious quarrels of the period. What is clear is that the early ‘revisionists’ were, with the exception of Derek Hirst, historians trained at Oxford. It was there that the revolt against figures like Hill, Tawney and Stone had been nurtured.
The school of ‘localist’ history inspired by Alan Everitt was a slightly earlier phenomenon. It had arisen from the debates over the fortunes of the gentry and concentrated upon county studies because such administrative units offered the opportunity to evaluate the role of the gentry in the period up to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, through those conflicts and beyond. It was from Everitt’s work that Russell borrowed his main explanatory device to account for the quarrels between successive Kings and their Parliaments.
The development of ‘revisionism’, if that is a permissible term, began before the contraction in the employment market for university teachers in the late-1960s but only appeared in print in the early to mid-1970s. American scholars were notable for their absence before that time. Some English scholars like Derek Hirst did find jobs in the United States but became detached from the main stream of discussions amongst early modern historians. Kishlansky too was a later figure, more concerned with the 1640s than with the origins of the conflicts in the pre-1640 period. By and large, Americans were peripheral to the debate rather than being central to it.
May I add that there was no dramatic increase in the availability of relevant archive material in the 1960s: that had already happened after 1945 and before 1960.
8 October 2007 at 10:38 pm
mercuriuspoliticus
Thank you so much for your comment. I will have to watch what I’m posting particularly carefully if you continue reading! It was interesting to get another perspective from someone who was involved. Funnily enough, I logged in and found your post just after I’d finished reading the Russell article where he talks about what “every schoolboy knows”. I will have to dig out JN Ball’s thesis if I get the chance.
Incidentally on a second reading of Hutton I think I have misrepresented a couple of his points – as you say the increase in archive material happened earlier than the 1960s, but I think Hutton was arguing that it was by the 1960s that it really started to filter through into publications. And I think the point he makes about American historians is due to the lack of being forced to seek patronage from the older generation of “Whigs”, unlike those in British universities, but like you I don’t find this very convincing.
I’ll be reading through Tyacke and then the rest on the debates about puritanism soon so hopefully will be posting my thoughts on that at some point.
9 October 2007 at 10:39 am
lered141939980
Many thanks for your response. Russell’s assault on the Whig interpretation of early Stuart Parliamentary history was essentially an attack on a straw man. It is no surprise that such a construct was easily demolished. Rather more surprising is the fact that this has only been pointed out by Christopher Thompson (whom you mention in your next post), the person responsible for interesting Conrad Russell in the subject of the Parliamentary history of the 1620s. If you look at Perez Zagorin’s work on Court and Country, you can see from the apparatus that it appears to have been composed in the early-1960s and drew on material that had become available in the archives and theses in the 1950s. Some British historians like Carlton and Cressy did seek posts in the USA in the late-1960s and early to mid-1970s, partly because very few jobs were avalailable in the UK. My own view is that, if one wishes to play a significant role in the debates on early modern English or British history, it is better to live here: it is definitely much more difficult to play such a role from across the Atlantic or from the southern hemisphere.