Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
1 - The shape of the seventeenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
Summary
For of Meridians and Parallels
Man hath weav'd out a net
and this net throwne Upon the Heavens
and now they are his owne.
Loth to goe up the hill, or labour thus
To goe to heaven
we make heaven come to us.
John Donne, ‘The First Anniversarie’ (1611)The Channel is no national boundary.
Leopold von Ranke, History of England (1875)INTRODUCTION
How should one structure a large-scale analysis of the seventeenth-century English political experience? Should one do so? Such histories have long been out of fashion. To attempt one is necessarily to step outside one's area of expertise. This is the most complex, the most important and the most violent century of English history. It is equally the most formidable and savage historiographical terrain. Entire historians have disappeared, leaving only a rent garment and the colour of blood in the water to show us where they had been.
One point from which to begin is the identification of those features by which our subject is distinguished, in time and place. In this respect it might be suggested that two things above all make seventeenth-century English history unique. The first is the length and depth of its experience of political instability. The second is its astonishing intellectual fertility. These two features were of course connected. It is this combination which distinguishes the seventeenth century within English history, and the experience of seventeenth-century England within Europe.
This experience of instability I have called, following contemporary usage, England's troubles: ‘the late troubles’; ‘our lamentable troubles’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- England's TroublesSeventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, pp. 20 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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