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Nearly 30 years have passed since the publication of John Morrill’s highly-influential article ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’.(1) In an effort to redress what he perceived as a tendency (largely among Whig and Marxist historians) towards over-simplifying the causes of the Civil War, Morrill pointed to a wider framework of ideological crises – in addit
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This is a monumental book, covering 91 noble families and 311 individual noblemen in 17 chapters of 482 pages of text and 89 pages of endnotes. The supporting material includes 19 plates, ten maps, 31 tables, ten figures and six appendices.
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The Reformation Studies Institute at St Andrews was founded in 1993, and since 1995 the Studies in Reformation History series has quite rightly earned a reputation for producing fascinating and scholarly collections, not simply for those interested in religious history and the reformations, but for those working on the early modern period more generally.
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One of the greatest challenges facing the historian is the problem of hindsight: we cannot un-know what happened next, but must nevertheless try to avoid seeing the past through a distorted lens. Hindsight does, however, have its advantages, and one of them is that it focuses attention on areas of the past which might otherwise be relatively neglected.
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David Bebbington’s latest book endeavours to shed light on the subject of Victorian revivalism by means of a series of case studies into various religious awakenings which took place between 1841 and 1880.
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Bernard Capp explores how godly reformers in England sought to create a better society and assesses the extent of their achievements at a time when Puritans were in an unprecedented position of power to reshape English society.
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This impressive collection has its origins in 2007 when the editors organized a conference on the regular canons in the British Isles, to shine a light on current research on this form of regular life. Scholarship on the regular canons has been rather overshadowed by that on the Benedictines and Cistercians, but this multidisciplinary publication does much to redress the balance.
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Historians who would assess the careers of contemporary religious leaders are on a hiding to nothing.
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Karen Overbey’s monograph is undoubtedly a welcome addition to the weighty collection of (predominantly antiquarian) archaeo- / art-historical studies focusing on medieval Irish relics and reliquaries, a healthy proportion of which is judiciously consolidated and summarised throughout the book.
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This important work is long overdue. It identifies two gaps in the existing historiography.