2025/08/12 by David Zaret · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1468-229x.70044
openalex publication_date 2025/08/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
This collection celebrates Peter Lake's groundbreaking work as the leading edge of a resurgent post-revisionism in early modern British history.It also fondly acknowledges his central position in a network of other distinguished historians with whom collaborations yielded a remarkable number of monographs, edited books and articles in a discipline dominated by solitary scholarship.This includes, but is not limited to, nearly half of the contributors to this Festschrift.The vast Lakean oeuvre advances a now widely followed ecumenical approach to historical research on highly controverted aspects of religion and politics.Topics tackled by Lake and his colleagues include controversial events and utterances in both elite and popular cultures as well as complex intersections between them.Yet another area of interest is demonstrating how religio-political and politico-religious disputes (both adjectives figure prominently in the Festschrift) among inhabitants of the past reverberate in work on controversial issues by subsequent generations of historians.This theme animates the volume's first two chapters, by Lori Anne Ferrell on the Victorian invention of Anglicanism and Simon Adams on still current disputes over the authenticity of eight letters supposedly by Mary, Queen of Scots, that implicated her in the murder of her husband.An especially appealing aspect of the book is its admixture of topics, some overlooked, others extensively covered by generations of historians.After the chapter by Adams, Richard Cust examines motivations for, and disputes over, gentry family chapels in parish churches, an oddly unexplored topic in the historiography of post-Reformation churches.Exemplary examples of new insights into subjects with extensive literatures include Ann Hughes on Nehemiah Wallington's ascetic reading and writing practices, Michael Braddick on John Lilburne's rhetorical invocation of 'the people' and Thomas Cogswell on connections and misconnections among the notorious male practitioner of witchcraft Dr Lambe, Lady Purbeck's sordid extra-marital affair and the Duke of Buckingham.Post-revisionism by Lake and his colleagues is a framework for doing history, as opposed to rigid conclusions about what actually happened, aside from an overarching premise about the ubiquity of ideological conflict among political and religious outlooks demarcated by fuzzy, sometimes unstable boundaries.Contributors to the Festschrift explore that capacious aside for diverse subjects.Hughes's survey of Wallington's obsessive reading and writing practices displays his wavering observations on Presbyterian and Independent initiatives in the first midseventeenth-century civil war.Analogously, Anthony Milton charts the not inevitable path taken by a well-connected puritan cleric, Samuel Torshell, leading, in 1639, to support for Scottish Covenanters despite his antipathy to 'Brownisme' (i.e.sectarians) and support for more than a few aspects of the status quo in the Church of England.This mode of doing history retains revisionist valorization of meticulous work with primary sources, which tends to deflate grand narratives about the seventeenth-century origins of modernization, but rejects its denial of widespread ideological conflict from the late-Tudor era onwards and misguided disdain for the historiographic value of printed sources.It generates amply documented lineages that link what came before, during and after mid-seventeenthcentury civil wars, without the teleology of a grand narrative.A key lineage, delineated by Nicholas Tyacke, is the transformation of Tudor antecedents into an enduring religio-political conception of popular sovereignty that persisted in English political culture long after the