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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2017
Concern over the present state of British history in North American colleges and universities, and more specifically British history of the “Tudor and Stuart” or “Early Modern” era, becomes steadily more intense. Conference panels are devoted to it, on-line conversations frequently indulge in it, and its hard to find an extended conversation amongst colleagues which doesn’t eventually take it up. Much of this may be prompted by the near disappearance of entry-level employment in the field, but this is of course the symptom of far deeper realities. When asked to contribute to a recent colloquium on the state of Early Modern British history in general, I chose to present a North American perspective on the subject. I hoped to affirm that there is such a perspective, and to distinguish it from what I saw as a British perspective. Though the world of ideas may indeed be universal, the worlds of teaching, studying, and academic employment are not. They are peculiar to specific national traditions, educational systems, and cultures.
In addition to Robin Winks, who invited me to address the Yale History Department which he chairs, and those numerous members of that Department who kindly shared their thoughts with me thereafter, I would like to thank Linda Peck, Norman Jones, Joseph Ward, and Dale Hoak, for their encouragement in gathering these thoughts; David Dean, Vanessa Harding, Tim Harris, Elizabeth Ewan, Retha Warnicke and Richard Greaves for their close reading of the penultimate draft, and Michael Moore, editor of Albion, for agreeing to publish this unconventional submission. I hasten to add that none of these fine scholars should be held responsible for anything which follows.
2 “Early Modern British History, Here, There and Everywhere,” delivered 16 April, 1998, as part of the Yale University series “Whither Early Modern British History?” Other speakers in the series, held between March and October, 1998, were Kevin Sharpe, Keith Wrightson, John Morrill, and Cynthia Herrup.
3 It is difficult to be too precise about these figures, as there is some lack of uniformity in the manner in which different departments list their fields, and the Directory lists the fields of faculty competence rather than the titles of actual courses. But—notwithstanding the fact that the 1996 volume of the Directory lists almost twice as many departments as the 1976 volume—the number of faculty identifying British history as one of their fields of competence has declined sharply.
4 Trask, David, “The AHA and Historians at Community Colleges,” Perspectives 34, 5 (May/June, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 These include, as of this writing and as indicated in the AHA Directory of History Departments and Organizations, 24th ed. (1998), such institutions as Northwestern, Rochester, Missouri, New York University, Victoria (British Columbia), and Minnesota.
6 This is not to deny, of course, that such junior appointments often prove very fine scholars. But junior scholars will take time to reach the point where they can assert the leadership of their predecessors.
7 As Patrick Collinson recently put it, “there has been surprisingly little conversation between Reformation historians and urban historians. They belong, as it were, to different clubs and do not conduct their business in the same seminars and conferences.” In Collinson, Patrick and Craig, John, ed., The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640 (Basingstoke and London, 1998), pp. 3–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 These designations are identified in Horn, Joyce M., ed., Teachers of History in the Universities of the United Kingdom (Institute of Historical Research, London, 1996)Google Scholar.
9 It is indeed fascinating to note that Elton’s days at Cambridge coincided with those of, for example, the Cambridge Population group, and that he was immediately succeeded by the likes of Patrick Collinson and Keith Wrightson.
10 Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England. c. 1400-1580 (New Haven and London, 1992Google Scholar) and McIntosh, Marjorie K., Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 This should be an especially easy reach for North Americans, who have so much less invested in the primacy of English history over that of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and who are rarely caught up in the contemporary resurgence of national identity in those component parts.
12 Everitt, Alan M., The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (1966)Google Scholar.
13 Morrill, J. S., The Revolt of the Provinces, Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 (London, 1976; 2nd ed. 1999)Google Scholar.
14 Underdown, David, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.
15 Founded in Toronto in 1975, Records of Early English Drama has now published, as of this writing, 18 volumes in all, essentially rewriting our understanding of mimetic activity, not only in London, but county by county and major town by major town, the realm over, to the year 1640.
16 Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (Toronto, 1972)Google Scholar, and English Towns in Transition (London, 1976), the former with important contributions by Charles Phythian-Adams, David Palliser, A. M. Johnson, Michael J. Power, Penelope Corfield and D. W. Jones, as well as the editors.
17 Especially Whiting, Robert, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; Haigh, Christopher, The English Reformations, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.
18 Especially in Underdown, David, Fire from Heaven, Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 1992)Google Scholar; Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, the Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Stations of the Sun, A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996); and Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells, National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989)Google Scholar and Birth, Marriage and Death; Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997).
19 Prominently, for example, in McIntosh’s, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370-1600Google Scholar.
20 Prominently in the work of Seaver, Paul, Wallington’s World, a Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London (Stanford, 1985)Google Scholar; Underdown, David, especially in Fire From Heaven, and Collinson, Patrick, especially in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1988) and The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar and what seem like scores of essays, and in the work of those who have been inspired by these three scholars.
21 Exemplified in the essays to be found in Hoak, Dale, Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar and also perhaps in Tittler, Robert, The Reformation and the Towns, Politics and Political Culture, 1540-1640 (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.
22 The project has involved the work on particular volumes of nearly forty scholars in universities scattered throughout Britain, Canada and the United States. In addition to individual R.E.E.D. volumes, see especially the Records of Early English Drama Newsletterpublished to 1997, and the journal Early Theatre, which has succeeded it (1998-), and monographs such as White, Paul Whitfield, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Plays in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; and McMillin, Scott and MacLean, Sally-Beth, The Queen’s Men (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar, which it has heavily influenced.
23 Especially in the many essays of Patrick Collinson and both essays and monographs of his students.
24 E.g., David Underdown, David Cressy, Ronald Hutton.
25 Representative works on this theme may be taken to include Aston, Margaret, The King’s Bedpost, Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Howard, Maurice, The Early Tudor Country House. Architecture and Politics, 1490-1550 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Tittler, Robert, Architecture and Power, the Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1500-1640 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; and a host of works by Sir Roy Strong.
26 See especially the eighteen essays (some by art historians, some by historians per se) in the pioneering collection edited by Gent, Lucy, Albion’s Classicism; the Visual Arts in Britain, 1550-1660 (New Haven and London, 1995)Google Scholar.
27 Especially in e.g., Amussen, Susan, An Ordered Society, Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988)Google Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (New Haven and London, 1995)Google Scholar. This point observes the distinction between the subject of gender and that of women’s or men’s history, which would of course have made for a much longer list.
28 Patterson, Annabel, now of Yale University, for Reading Holinshed’s. Chronicles (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar.
29 I am pleased to note that, as of this writing, an NACBS committee has been struck to deal with the state of the field, but I am not aware of the nature or progress of its deliberations.