Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds. A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. x + 338 pp. index. $65. ISBN: 0-521-80252-0.

"What, if anything, was new in the Restoration?" The question posed by Tim Harris in a stimulating essay, "Understanding popular politics in Restoration Britain," weaves a sinuous thread of uncertainty through this often engaging collection, the offspring of a 1996 symposium at the Huntington Library. The Restoration was, after all, self-defined as no new thing under the sun, but an attempt to wipe away the years of Interregnum, to enact "Oblivion." The edifice of that Whig history which viewed the last Stuarts as a hesitant step in the triumphal progress of parliamentarianism has been sapped and mined by the revisionists of the 1980s and 1990s. This book seeks to revise the revision and, through the detail of microhistory, to rewrite the master narrative of the late seventeenth century.

One consistent theme is the secularization of the Restoration mind (Blair Worden's subject, 20-40); religious observance may be as vigorously enjoined, toleration debated, and conformity enforced, but the foundation of political conduct is no longer implicitly faith. Mark Knights (41-70) elegantly demonstrates that "meer" collocates itself with "religion," not as an index of insignificance, but of a parturition from a new secular understanding of politics. John Owen (Cromwell's Chaplain) maintained after the Restoration that "nothing certain be left, nothing unshaken" (27). Both Royalists and Roundheads had learned the folly of believing their God would defend an earthly government. Henceforth, the link of faith and state would cease to command intellectual allegiance, despite remaining enshrined in law. Both state and faith would increasingly appear issues of choice for individuals or communities, enfranchised by increased awareness of alternative models for social and political stability, discussed in Rachel Weil's account of the Filmer-Locke debate on patriarchy.

This kind of history can run the risk of an esotericism where its practitioners speak only with one another; Gary De Krey, in an essay on "radicalism" in the Restoration (71-99), is acutely aware of this: "Mystery has replaced history when the academic doors are locked with new-patterned keys cut in a subfield of another discipline known to few. The proposed banishment of the name radical would make more difficult the exchange of conclusions among scholars who work with different assumptions, with different evidence, and with different questions" (99). We must acknowledge the unknowability of the past even as we simultaneously insist on the absolute importance of the effort to understand it.

From the collection as a whole emerges a new protagonist, to be celebrated in the novel Pindarics of a Cowley, as Joshua Scodel argues: the heroic entrepreneur, be he traveler, philosopher, merchant, experimentalist, or, indeed, the poet himself, for the first time evaluating poetry as a trade, or seeking to establish copyright in a newly-commercialized theater (see Paulina Kewes on "Plays as Property, 1660-1710)." Literary works, led by Milton's exemplary epic, start to move away from direct political proselytism towards a newly-legitimized sense of "diversion," in which, as Joseph Glanvill asserted (32), zeal is "ill manners" (although the satire of the age is ill-mannered enough). The shadow of civil swords hangs heavy over the fear of uncivil words.

A Polite and Commercial People is Paul Langford's title for his classic study of eighteenth-century Britain. The beginnings of that commercialism are charted here, in the replacement, in Steve Pincus' words, of "holy cause" with "economic interest," but scant attention is paid to social change, to exploring the new politeness in conduct which the restored king carried in his French luggage. There is nothing here on the revolution in dress, in table manners, in the forms of courtesy, nothing on fashion and its powerful impact on contemporary minds and habits. Charles' continental travels are barely mentioned, despite their impact on court and (ripplingly) country. An essay by a social historian would have made for a more balanced account.

As Barbara Shapiro writes in the final essay on "Natural Philosophy and political periodization," "the story [of Restoration science] may be told as either one of continuity ... or ... discontinuity." Like Janus, the Restoration faces both ways. Because Charles II was too shrewd to repeat his father's direct confrontation with parliamentary power, one face looks forward to the bloodless victory of a sovereign parliament in a modern polity; but its other eyes are locked upon the bleeding trunk of Charles Stuart, king and martyr.

PAUL HARTLE

St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge