England's Troubles

In this path-breaking study, first published in 2000, Jonathan Scott argues that seventeenth-century English history was shaped by three processes. The first was destructive: that experience of political instability which contemporaries called 'our troubles'. The second was creative: its spectacular intellectual consequence in the English revolution. The third was reconstructive: the long restoration voyage toward safe haven from these terrifying storms. Driving the troubles were fears and passions animated by European religious and political developments. The result registered the impact upon fragile institutions of powerful beliefs. One feature of this analysis is its relationship of the history of events to that of ideas. Another is its consideration of these processes across the century as a whole. The most important is its restoration of this extraordinary English experience to its European context.

'Shot through with brilliance and an extraordinarily powerful historical intelligence.' John Morrill, University of Cambridge, 'Breathtaking in its scope, magisterial in its thesis, and intellectually provocative, the work will spark widespread discussion for a very long time to come.' Richard L. Greaves, Florida State University, 'We have had no interpretative synthesis as original or as comprehensive since Hill's Century of Revolution. The elegance, coherence and sweep of the approach deserve to make this book a focus of discussion for all early modernists.' Glenn Burgess, University of Hull, '… full of acute criticisms, new emphases, apt and fresh quotations … as a myriad of particular insights and revisions, Scott offers a stimulating panorama of the whole seventeenth century, the first large-scale explanatory analysis that takes as beyond the attenuated and sterile debates over revisionism.' Kevin Sharpe, History Today, 'A work of unsurpassed imagination, unrelenting originality and unabashed boldness … It is brimming with originality and stuffed with insights that make it the most stimulating book on seventeenth-century history to have appeared in years, if not decades.' The Times Literary Supplement