Michael Mendle, ed. The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii + 297 pp. illus, index. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-65015-1.

As Michael Mendle notes in an often witty introduction, discussion of the details of the meeting of the army council at Putney in 1647 is a recent historiographical trend, even more so under its now well-known nomenclature, "The Putney Debates." The first publication of the debates, just over a century ago, was met with little fanfare--a century later they have become adopted by everyone from socialists to New Labour to libertarians as an important part of the foundations of democracy, justice, and representation in Western society. Needless to say, they have also been adopted by historians as key texts in the ongoing debates over the English Revolution. The reader of this volume, however, will have to look elsewhere for details of the discussions held at Putney. These are missing from debate in an otherwise excellent volume.

The origin of the volume lies in conferences to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the debates, held at the Folger Shakespeare Library and in Putney Church itself in 1997. However, this is more than the usual volume of conference papers and Mendle is to be congratulated not only for his editorial work but commissioning essays for inclusion. A exceptional group of contributors have without exception produced articles of the highest quality, founded upon original scholarship. Some may quibble at the relentless revisionist tone of the papers, but they will remain core reading for a long time to come.

The volume opens with two essays on the Putney manuscript itself. Lesley Le Claire's history of the manuscript provides fascinating reading while Frances Henderson puts to good use her sterling efforts in transcribing and decoding William Clarke's notes to examine how he recorded the debates. In the second section, Austin Woolrych rehearses his impressive arguments from Soldiers and Statesmen to review what the army thought about the meeting while Barbara Taft presents a reappraisal of Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law, arguing that his opposition to greater political representation for those disenfranchised was not as fixed as it has previously been portrayed by his words at Putney. Ireton also forms part oflan Gentle's discussion of the various "Agreements of the People," in which he illustrates how this key Leveller text changed between 1647-49, moving from calls for enfranchisement and political realism to a "quixotic vision of a radically libertarian England, a decentralized federation of the localities" (174). Barbara Donagan contributes an important essay on soldiers' indemnity, arguing that it is necessary to examine the practical concerns of the army as "soldiers" as well as what she terms their "political, democratic and timeless" claims. Mendle's piece also stresses the importance of the issue of indemnity in his examination of the self-consciousness and identity of the participants at Putney. Perhaps the most radical essay in the volume is Philip Baker and John Morrill's investigation of the authorship of The Case of the Armie. They argue that the author/compiler was more likely to have been Edward Sexby than John Wildman. Furthermore, the text was not simply the work of Sexby but in fact a composite army document which was markedly different from the Agreement of the People. This reading of the Case of the Armie emphasizes the notion of a search for consensus and questions the presence and influence of the Levellers at Putney.

The last section of the volume, "Levellers and Levellerism in history and historiography" opens with a piece by Patricia Crawford on women and citizenship in early modern England. She questions the radicalism of the Levellers arguing effectively that the subject of women's rights was not unthinkable, but absent nonetheless from the debates at Putney. Crawford makes an important contribution, noting that the debates "took place in a historical context in which ordinary women had some rights to participate as citizens" (217). In the following essay Tim Harris contrasts the Levellers with Whig politicking in the Exclusion crisis while Blair Worden's review of the historiography of the Levellers before 1960 is a valuable (and entertaining) survey of the uses to which the Levellers have been put by historians and politicians alike. William Lamont focuses upon A.S.P. Woodhouse's 1938 edition of the debates, looking at connections between Puritanism and Liberty (as Woodhouse titled his volume). The collection is neatly concluded with an afterword by John Pocock, emphasizing not only the importance of the debates, but how "it remains extraordinary that we should have this, and only this, record of them" (284). This may be true, but our understanding of their context and "history" is much advanced after the publication of this volume.

CHRIS R. KYLE

Syracuse University