The varieties of politics in early modern britain and ireland

Abstract

The political history of early modern Britain and Ireland continues to expand and develop in exciting and creative ways. It seems that most historical subjects have their political aspects, and we have certainly moved a long way from the days when political, social, cultural, and religious histories inhabited different worlds with relatively little overlap between them. Instead, the climate at present is inclusive enough to discern politics in the most varied and diverse phenomena. Two of the five books under review make this explicit in their very titles when they speak of the ‘politics of violence’ (Beaver) and the ‘politics … of honour’ (Kane). We are currently living in a historiographical world where a recent essay on ‘culinary politics’ is accepted as mainstream where once it might have seemed esoteric.1 Taken together, these five books offer a fascinating cross-section of the diversity of attitudes, forms, and activities from the early sixteenth to the mideighteenth centuries that can usefully be termed political and the ways in which they might be explored.