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.

LRB 21 January 1988 | PDF Download