Will these bones live?

Ezek. 37.1-14

It is a term proposed to alleviate ignorance of the causes, as physicians are wont to call the strange effects of plants and minerals "secret powers," not because they have no causes, but because their causes are unknown. And indeed, there is nothing in nature or event that does not have a whole chain of causes, which, though obscure to us, cannot be so to God, who is the first cause of all things.

Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, p. 300[1968]

You all who have overthrown the old tyrants, look seriously what you still have to do, and so that you can create and maintain the equality of all goods and lands... And if you don't do that, you're worse than the old tyrants, because you claim to improve and they don't.

[Anon.], Tyranipocrit, Discovered with his

wiles, wherewith he vanquisheth (Rotterdam, 1649)

(ed. A. Hopton, n.d.), p. 33

The Civil War of the Seventeenth Century... has never been completed.

T.S. Eliot, Milton (1947)

I

One of my long-held beliefs, which has been confirmed in the process of writing this book, is that we impoverish our understanding of the past if we break it down into small pieces called "constitutional history," "economic history," "literary history," "political history," and so on; And we are no less impoverished if we allow the statistical calculations of demographers to hide human lives behind unreliable records of births, marriages, and deaths.

I remember being amazed when I first read T.S. Eliot's statement about the art of the poet at a tender age. "The soul of the poet... constantly combines a variety of impressions. An ordinary person... falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the sounds of a typewriter, or with the smells of food being prepared; In the poet's soul, these experiences always form a new whole" [1969]. Without wishing to make too great a claim to history, and still less to distinguish historians from "ordinary people," I think that there is some truth in Sidney's statement: "The best of historians is the subject of the poet." In a letter to his brother Robert in 1580, Sidney described the poet's art in words that fit a historian. "A poet in the depiction of effects, movements, whispers of people can be recognized as truthful, and yet he who notices them well will find in them a taste of a poetic streak... for although they were not, it is sufficient that they could be" [1971].

There are analogies between the historian's interpretive task and Sidney's and Eliot's description of the poet's practice. The historian should not dwell on the surface of events; His interests should not be limited to state papers, parliamentary debates, acts and ordinances, decisions of judges and local authorities, and still less to the battles and love affairs of kings. He must "listen"—cautiously and critically—to ballads, plays, pamphlets, newspapers, tracts, "whispers of men," coded diaries and private correspondence of members of parliament, spiritual autobiographies—any source that can help him or her to get a sense of how people lived and how their perceptions differed from ours. He or she should try to understand why even the most democratic of the seventeenth-century reformers apparently never thought of allowing 50 percent of the population to participate in the political or professional life of the country—women. Yes, women, as it seems, did not ask for such things. The historian must listen to alchemists and astrologers no less than to the bishops to the demands of the London crowds; And he or she should try to understand the motivation of the rebels, whether they were labeled anti-Catholic rebels, or anti-fencers, or simply rioters demanding food. Much of the work had already been done, not least by literary historians and literary critics who had not yet been included in the mainstream of historical scholarship.