Preface

Summary

When I started this study I intended to produce a short second book that I thought could be quickly researched and written. That was almost twenty years ago. The Restoration then seemed to be a fairly straightforward and relatively neglected field of English history. But since the early 1980s the period has attracted many creative and intellectually ambitious historians, while the old field of Tudor and Stuart English history has been transformed by a variety of revisionist approaches to Early Modern Britain.

London and the Restoration is my response to the new historical writing about the Restoration and to the transformation of the broader historical field. It could not have been written without engaging, both personally and professionally, with many other scholars at every stage of their professional work and with a few no longer living. I have disagreed about important questions with some of them, but I can think of no one with whom I have disagreed from whom I have not also learned a great deal. If I acknowledge only a few scholars, colleagues, and friends by name here, I hope that others will find my engagement with their work reflected in what follows. Henry Horwitz and Lois Schwoerer each took an interest in my work at an early stage; and they have, in their different ways, contributed to my understanding of the Restoration. They have provided countless recommendations and evaluations of my scholarship over the years, and I am deeply grateful to each of them.