Liberty, Authority, Formality

John Morrow

Description

The essays in this volume are all inspired by the historical scholarship of J.C. Davis. During a prolific career, Davis has transformed our understanding of early modern utopian literature and its contexts, and compelled students of seventeenth-century English to re-evaluate the significance of movements and individuals who have had a prominent place in the historiography of the English Revolution. Davis's analyses of groups like the Levellers and individuals like Gerrard Winstanley and Oliver Cromwell has reoriented the inquiry around the contemporary moral themes of liberty, authority and formality-around which concepts this volume engages.

Sujets

• Ideology

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845403966
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
LIBERTY, AUTHORITY, FORMALITY
Political Ideas and Culture, 1600-1900
Essays in Honour of Colin Davis
Edited by John Morrow and Jonathan Scott



Copyright Page
Collection and Introduction © John Morrow and Jonathan Scott, 2008
Essays © Respective authors, 2008
The moral rights of the contributors have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX55YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by
Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
Digital version converted and published in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Preface
The career which began when J. C. (Colin) Davis enrolled as an undergraduate at Manchester University has included distinguished service at three New Zealand universities (Waikato, Victoria and Massey) and at the University of East Anglia. In all of these places he is remembered not only as an inspiring teacher and supervisor but as someone who thought hard and worked harder for the whole academic community of which he was part. Although the University of East Anglia benefited particularly from his capacity for academic leadership, the desire to relate the work of university historians to wider interests has been a feature of his entire career. So too has been the international scope of his own work and professional relationships within the English-speaking world and in continental Europe.
Preparation of this volume began in 2004 to mark Colin’s retirement from his Professorship of English History at UEA the following year. Contributions were invited from friends, students and colleagues whose association with Colin extends to every stage of his career. The editors have been very fortunate in their contributors and wish to record their thanks to them. We all share an admiration for Colin’s pioneering contributions to early modern scholarship as well as deep gratitude for his rich and generous engagement with the work of others. Those who have been his students and colleagues are proud to regard him as a friend. It is a matter of great regret that Peter Munz, who was responsible for appointing Colin to Victoria University of Wellington and provided strong support for him there, died while this volume was being prepared. The editors are most grateful to Anne Munz and Justin Cargill for their help in preparing Peter’s essay for the press.
The editors also owe much to Mrs Jocelyn Gamble, the Executive Assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Auckland, for invaluable assistance in managing this project and preparing the typescript. The contributors know her email address at least as well as that of either of the editors. Jocelyn has also played a major role in researching and compiling the bibliography of Colin’s work that appears here. Sandra Davis very kindly supplied some of the material for the bibliography. We are pleased to record our appreciation to Iain Hampsher-Monk for his help in facilitating publication and to Anthony Freeman of Imprint Academic and Frank Morrow of Open Digital Solutions for their role in producing this volume.
John Morrow and Jonathan Scott
Auckland and Pittsburgh



An Appreciation of Colin Davis
Dámaso de Lario
... there is no other path but the one in which we can recognize ourselves in every gesture and in every word: that of the obstinate loyalty to ourselves. [1]
(José Saramago, De este Mundo y del Otro )
I find those words of the Portuguese Literature Nobel Prize winner José Saramago fitting to sum up Colin Davis’s persona as a scholar, an academic, a teacher, a friend and a man of his time. Our paths crossed rather late in life, in 1993, three years after he took up his Chair of History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and only a few months after I had started my job as Cultural Attaché at the Spanish Embassy in London. As in the film Casablanca , that was the beginning of a long friendship that at the time (my London tenure lasted until 1998) allowed us to develop a number of projects together and later matured into a rich and creative personal and intellectual exchange.
Born in Yorkshire into a fisherman’s family, Colin (J. C. in the academic literature) Davis trained at the University of Manchester, and after a short stint at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - where he was destined to become a Russian expert - he took up an offer to teach at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. Given that he subsequently made his name as a ‘historian of political and religious thought and as a brilliant and provocative iconoclast’, diplomacy’s loss was certainly academia’s gain. [2]
I have always wondered how much chance plays in a scholar’s choice of the subject matter of his research and how much this is influenced by the scholar’s own tenets. Or to put it perhaps in a more metaphysical way: are scholars attracted to the subject matters of their research or is it the other way around? To what extent can the scholar’s tenets, in the long term, be affected by his or her research and also how can this be influenced by those tenets? In the case of history, E. P. Thompson had ‘repeatedly insisted on the duty of the historian to “listen” to all of his sources, rather than merely giving shape to them’, but the key issue, as Colin Davis put it, was whether that ‘listening [is] done to inform one’s perspective or according to one’s perspective’. [3]
Given his analytical and argumentative capacity, his eye for detail and his ability to keep his sources ‘at a distance’, Colin Davis could have been a superb legal historian - to mention a discipline very close to my own intellectual interests. He chose instead a speculative area of history and there he centred first on ‘the chimaera of utopian speculation’. [4] He did so because he discerned there something that appeared to have gone unnoticed to previous historians of political thought. The ideas of the ‘ill-assorted few’, as Davis described the early modern English utopians, ‘stand at the fountainhead of a long and dominating political process ... [and] they help to reveal something fundamental about the nature of political idealism. The process ... is the growth of the centralised, bureaucratic, sovereign state with its impersonal, institutional apparatus’. [5]
Yet the history of the utopians as a whole, like that of the Levellers and of the Ranters, or the lives of Gerrard Winstanley, James Harrington or even Oliver Cromwell, to all of whom Davis has devoted a great deal of time and effort, is not the history of winners, in the mainstream sense of the word. But it fits with Colin Davis’s ethos - hence the logic of the choice of his subject matter - and his radicalism without concessions. Thus his admiration for Christopher Hill did not prevent Davis from taking issue with him, and other ‘fine radical commentators’, for accepting ‘as real a highly conservative and admonitory projection or myth from the 1650s’ in a brilliant book where he proves that the Ranters were no more than ‘a mythic projection’. [6] The same goes for John Morrill, with whom, in spite of a close personal friendship and a genuine appreciation for his work, Colin Davis maintains serious disagreements on the interpretation of the English Revolution.
In spite of his recognized contributions to the history of English political thought, which have stimulated reconsideration of ‘the traditional categories in which historians had grouped Civil War radicals’, [7] Colin Davis has never ‘quite felt comfortable with the description of “expert”, preferring to think of [himself] as a student. The difference is that what the years have given us is a confidence that we can derive an argument out of a mass of material and engage with its intellectual significance’. [8] And this is precisely one of Davis’s distinctive features as a scholar: his constant quest for learning, through an argumentative approach to the sources, together with his efforts to make of history a useful tool for better understanding the world in which we live. [9] With this he combines a compassionate approach to his characters, no matter the severity of his historical scrutiny of their lives. He thus invites us to think of Cromwell ‘rather more like ourselves, caught, most of the time, in the mess of the limitations of his society and therefore condemned to repeat what he has found to be the deficiencies of others’; [10] or admits that Winstanley’s life pattern was not a smooth one ‘but then when does any life conform to a smooth pattern? - but partly because of that feels more authentic ... and it also helps us to understand more’. [11] He also suggests the possibility of a history of a radicalism which, ‘while standing in a critical relationship to the status quo and seeking transformation, is not automatically coming to that task from a position of radical alienation’, a difficult perception to pursue but one that would reward us with ‘a richer and more human appreciation of the fitful impulse towards transformative change in our history’. [12]
It is unfortunate that lack of time and other commitments may prevent Colin Davis from bringing his work on liberty and formality together with studies of ideas of authority in Early Modern England ‘to show how the collapse of the ideas of formality and the transformation of the civic persona have left us with a serious crisis in the understanding of civic responsibility and citizenship’. [13] I very much hope that this Festschrift succeeds in closing at least part of the gap that the lack of implementation of that project would leave.