In this fascinating collection, twelve colleagues of the late Mark Kishlansky come together to reconsider the meanings of England's mid-seventeenth-century revolution. Their chapters range widely: from shipboard to urban conflicts; from court sermons to local finances; from debates over hairstyles to debates over the meanings of regicide; from courtrooms to pamphlet wars; and from religious rights to human rights. Taken together, they indicate how we might improve our understanding of a turbulent epoch in political history by approaching it more modestly and quietly than historians of recent decades have often done.

Revolutionising politics will appeal to professional historians and their students interested in the social, cultural, religious and legal history of seventeenth-century English politics. Specific chapters will interest scholars in book history, the cultural history of politics and the history of political, civil and human rights.

Reviews

Revolutionising politics presents twelve chapters that reflect on and engage with the scholarship of the late Mark Kishlansky. As a historian of seventeenth-century Britain, Kishlansky made major contributions to our understanding of England's mid-century revolution. He challenged the idea that it was the result of a long process of political transformation and emphasised how dramatically it reshaped and modernised English politics.

Contributors to this volume explore an array of topics relating to the revolution. They range widely, from shipboard to urban conflicts, from court sermons to local finances, from debates over hairstyles to debates over the meanings of regicide, from courtrooms to pamphlet wars and from religious rights to human rights. By engaging and often challenging some of Kishlansky's most important arguments about the era, these chapters indicate how we might improve our understanding of a turbulent epoch by approaching it more modestly and quietly than historians of recent decades have often done. The volume thus offers new ways for considering the history of conflict as practices we associate with modern political thought and action came into being nearly four centuries ago.

Featuring contributions from an international group of distinguished historians, Revolutionising politics will be of interest to students and scholars of seventeenth-century British history and politics.

Foreword: Why was Kish a historian? - John Morrill
Introduction: Mark Kishlansky's Revolution - Eleanor Hubbard, Scott Sowerby and Paul D. Halliday
Part I: Conceiving politics
1 Honour and anger: shipboard politics in 1627 - Eleanor Hubbard
2 Hannibal ad Portas: necessity, public law and the common law emergency in the Case of Ship Money - David Chan Smith
3 Predestination, presumption and popularity: Robert Skinner explains the ideological underpinnings of the Personal Rule - Peter Lake
4 Gender, inversion and the causes of the English Civil War - Susan D. Amussen
5 Eikon Basilike in context: the intellectual history of a martyrdom - Jeffrey Collins
6 England's human rights revolution, 1646-52 - Paul D. Halliday
Part II: Practicing politics
7 Consensus, division and voting in early Stuart towns - Catherine Patterson
8 'For the better vindication of his Majestie in forreigne partes': orchestrating English polemics in Paris and The Hague, 1645-8 - Thomas Cogswell
9 The Scots, the Parliament and the people: The Rise of the New Model Army revisited - Ann Hughes
10 The 'great purse of the City': the consequences of London's Civil War finances for livery company charities - Joseph P. Ward
11 Trading toleration for troops: Charles I and Catholics in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms - Scott Sowerby
Index

Editors

Paul D. Halliday is the Julian Bishko Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia
Eleanor Hubbard is Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study
Scott Sowerby is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University