Roger Richardson – författare

The debate on the English Revolution is firmly established as an essential guide to the literature in its field and appears here in a much revised third edition. Three new chapters are included on twentieth-century historians' treatments of social complexities, politics, political culture and revisionism, and on the Revolution's unstoppable reverberations. All the other chapters have been amended and recast to take account of recent publications. The book provides a searching re-examination of why the English Revolution remains such a provocatively controversial subject and analyses the different ways in which historians over the last three centuries have tried to explain its causes, course and consequences. Claredon, Hume, Macaulay, Gardiner, Tawney, Hill, and the present-day revisionists are given extended treatment, while discussion of the work of numerous other historians is integrated into a coherent, informative readable survey.

Oliver Cromwell has been both applauded and reviled and his memory invoked in periods and in countries other than his own. This complex historiography has left us today with many different versions of Cromwell as man, general and statesman of which the conflicting images are the subject of this book.Available in paperback for the first time, this classic study is based on the unfinished magnum opus of the leading scholar of seventeenth-century history, Roger Howell (1936?89). It includes chapters by a team of leading international experts on a broad range of subjects originally planned by Howell himself. It includes Howell’s studies of the reactions to Cromwell in the Restoration period and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Added to these are reprints of his essays on psychohistorical approaches to Cromwell and on Cromwell’s contribution to English liberty. Further historiographical portraits of the Protector are offered in chapters which consider Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution; Carlyle’s Cromwell; Irish images of the Protector; American interpretations; and the comparisons made between Cromwell and the twentieth-century dictators.

This lively socio-cultural history examines household service, one of the largest, multi-layered, mobile and most indispensable sectors of employment in early modern England. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural sources including literary depiction and self-representation, this study to brings into sharp focus individual life stories of Britain’s servant class. Exploring the relationships between servants and between employers and servants; it depicts the differences between patterns of employment in London and the provinces, and the juxtaposition of servant vulnerability and servant ‘power’. This book places new importance on the household servant as a major agent in cultural change and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of servitude in London and the provinces in the two centuries following the Reformation.