Social History, Local History, and Historiography: Collected Essays
This wide-ranging volume collects together twelve of the author’s longer essays, mainly drawn from those first published in the last two decades. Chiefly consisting of micro-studies of a variety of different aspects of early modern English history, the book concerns itself with social and economic change, the period of the English Revolution and its long-lasting impact, with Puritanism, with the family as a social institution, and with historical consciousness and different forms of historical writing. Some of the essays focus on a particular individual, not all well known – William Camden, John Milner, and Ralph Dutton – to open up a broader theme. One boldly attempts a comparison over three centuries of the evolution of local history as a subject on both sides of the Atlantic. Two other essays reach out into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but do so with echoes of the subject matter of some of those dealing with the early modern period. The inter-connectedness of social history, local history, and historiography is stressed and illustrated throughout. Both specialists and non-specialists will find much to interest them in this varied and rewarding volume.
R.C. Richardson is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Winchester in England, where he taught from 1977. He has held visiting professorships in the USA on a number of occasions, has co-edited the international journal Literature & History since its founding in 1975, and has served as General Editor for two successful series of books published by Manchester University Press. He is himself the author or editor of many volumes, including Puritanism in North West England (1972), The Debate on the English Revolution (1977, 3rd ed., 1998), Images of Oliver Cromwell (1993), The Changing Face of English Local History (2000), and Household Servants in Early Modern England (2010).
''In short, Richardson’s volumes help the reader – perhaps the essay writing student – to understand not just the horrors of civil war, but also gender relationships, in the fraught conditions of the seventeenth century. What is offered is a graphic and thought-provoking collection of experiences – some personal and some collective – produced in times that were highly troubled and which delivered much hardship. The reader emerges enlightened, informed, stimulated and perhaps also grateful to have been spared the miseries of religious strife.''
- Olwen Hufton, Literature & History, 21:2 (Autumn 2012), 78-80.
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