***In The Age Of “The World Turned Upside Down”- D.H. Pennington’s “Europe In The Seventeenth Century”- A Book Review

 

Book Review

Europe In The Seventeenth Century, Second Edition, D.H. Pennington, Longman, London, 1970

No question when I think of 17^th century European history I am drawn immediately to think about the English bourgeois revolution of the mid-century. That event put paid to the notion that a ruler could rule by divine right and that through various twists and turns, not all of them historically progressive by any means, some rough semblance of democratic rule would work best in tandem with emerging capitalist order (of course the process stretched out for some two centuries bit the shell was established then) as the means of creating a stable society. Aside from kings and queens having to worry, worry to death, about their pretty little necks (asks Charles I and Louis XVI, among others) and having rough-hewn, warts and all, rulers like Oliver Cromwell entry the scene many other things were going on in Europe in the 17^th century that would contribute as well to what we would recognize as a modern Europe. What those events were, and their importance, was why when I was first seriously looking at the English Revolution back in the late 1970s I picked up Professor Pennington’s nice little survey book (well maybe not little at six hundred plus pages). And a recent re-reading only confirms (with the obvious acknowledgement of a need for some updating) that worth as a primer.