Blair Worden
The Pen & the Sword
God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars
By Michael Braddick
Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 784pp £30 order from our bookshop
There has been nothing in English historical writing over recent decades to match the intensity of interest in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The foundations were laid a century or so ago, when S R Gardiner, aided by his protégé C H Firth, brought to the period a depth of chronological and documentary investigation that other periods have rarely or never acquired. Gardiner did not write well. His contemporaries, used to reading less searching but more eloquent narratives, were dismayed by his ‘barren and poverty-stricken prose’. Half a century passed before historians with more trenchant pens – R H Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hill, Jack Hexter – built on Gardiner’s foundations to create the analytical excitement of ‘the gentry controversy’ and of parallel attempts to relate the wars to long-term social and economic developments. Those debates commanded a lay as well as a professional audience. Yet in the next generation, with the rise of the doctoral thesis, civil war scholarship became predominantly the preserve of academics, who wrote only for each other.
Behind much of the gentry controversy there lay an economic determinism, or semi-determinism, which discounted the art of narrative. If events are the mere surface of history, beneath which irresistible currents flow, then their recreation will seem a trivial process. Few historians of the civil wars are determinists now. Hardly
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford
'That they signify something is not in question. Yet how to interpret the symbols of a long-vanished society? What would the inhabitants of the 50th century make of the ubiquity of crosses in Europe?'
Hilary Davies on the art of the Lascaux caves.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/poems-of-the-underground