The 1630s

For long historians felt that there was little need to pay attention to the decade of the 1630s, which was seen as a prologue (albeit inextricably drawn out) to inevitable civil war. Literary scholars similarly neglected the decade, regarding it as a period of sterility between great Renaissance and Restoration writing. Over the last twenty years, however, revisionist and post-revisionist researches, new critical attention to what was once too simply described as ‘cavalier' drama and poetry, and (most of all) new interdisciplinary approaches, have begun to refigure the Caroline period. The 1630s continues recent work in a volume which insists on the need for ‘a range of theoretical and methodological approaches' to explicate fully the relations of culture and politics central to understanding any aspect of the decade. The introduction urges a departure from excessive emphasis on Charles I himself and the exploration of ‘alternative viewpoints' and ‘a much wider understanding of the political'. Such counsels, and the editors' insistence on the importance of regional networks, are sound enough, and the caution that emphasis on Britain has turned attention away from more important European perspectives is welcome. But the introduction does not really offer a new programme of research or new methods; nor do its general prescriptions seem to have much informed many of the essays

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Viewpoints · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity

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