Intellectual Liberation

Blair Worden

• Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans by Hugh Trevor-Roper
  Secker, 317 pp, £17.50, November 1987, ISBN 0 436 42512 2
• Archbishop William Laud by Charles Carlton
  Routledge, 272 pp, £25.00, December 1987, ISBN 0 7102 0463 9
• Clarendon and his Friends by Richard Ollard
  Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp, £15.00, September 1987, ISBN 0 241 12380 1
• Anti-Calvinists by Nicholas Tyacke
  Oxford, 305 pp, £30.00, February 1987, ISBN 0 19 822939 9
• Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I by Kevin Sharpe
  Cambridge, 309 pp, £27.50, December 1987, ISBN 0 521 34239 2

Among Hugh Trevor-Roper’s historical interests it is the Early Modern period, from the late Renaissance to the Baroque, that has claimed his most distinctive literary form, the long essay. He is our finest practitioner of the genre since Macaulay – who wrote when the economics of publishing were friendlier to it. Twenty years ago the essays collected in Trevor-Roper’s Religion, the Reformation and Social Change examined the ideological crisis of the Thirty Years War and of the political revolutions which followed it. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, which contains five essays of an average length of about 25,000 words, is in effect a sequel to that volume. It differs from it in containing essays only on Britain, but British history – particularly British intellectual history – is placed no less insistently than before in its European context.