Insolent Proceedings: Rethinking Public Politics in the English Revolution. Essays in Honour of Ann HughesPeterLake and JasonPeacey, eds. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2022. 280pp. ISBN 13: 9781526165008. £90 (cloth)

This engaging and varied volume is a fitting tribute to the work of Ann Hughes. It reflects her wide-ranging interests in the national and local religious and political cultures, and gendered politics, of the English Revolution. Peter Lake kicks off the volume with a perceptive, warm, and witty account of Hughes's work and its contribution to a historiography that has now (he suggests) matured beyond the need for the "post-revisionist" label. The editors' Introduction situates Hughes's work and the essays in this volume in that framework nonetheless, foregrounding what we might call the integrative impulse characteristic of post-revisionism and its refusal of reductive dichotomies or choices of focus. They suggest that we can understand the extraordinary phenomena of the revolutionary decades only by situating them within rich contexts which are characterised across a range of dimensions. Thus the religious and the political need to be woven together; the local and the national; face-to-face and printed communication; elite and popular politics; the radical extremes and the broader contexts from which they emerged and in which they operated—and the study of any individual moment or network or phenomenon of the revolution is likely to draw many of these areas together. In keeping with this emphasis on integration, many of the essays in this volume develop lines of argument that cross between themes. It is refreshing to see that, while Hughes had to write a landmark book on gender in the English Revolution, partly to redress blind spots that had left the historiography unbalanced, and to draw together diverse material which had not come fully into focus into one volume, here numerous chapters on diverse topics weave the role of women (or of gendered representation, in the case of Thomas Cogswell's account of the "Black Legend" of the House of Stuart) into their overall accounts. Twenty-four women are seen contributing to funds raised for the General Rising in 1643 in David Como's chapter, actively involved in the networks surrounding this moment of mobilization for the parliamentarian cause. In Jason Peacey's chapter, women "from all walks of life" were involved in local disputes surrounding a Kent minister, the sometimes gendered play of these local interactions and their implications for women's reputations making their way, in this case, into print. Kate Peters shows women involved in religious disputations between Quakers and Ranters in the 1650s, organizing, hosting, and participating in meetings which often—not least because of legal jeopardy, but perhaps facilitating women's involvement—took place in a "liminal space between public and private" in chambers or houses. Karen Britland foregrounds gender, class, and the body in her discussion of messengers used by royalist elite actors in the civil war years to smuggle letters and documents in and out of royalist areas, showing how reportage and later traditions of historiography have elided the identities of these messengers and homogenized their status, suggesting that they were all of "mean"condition, but also how the overlooked bodies of women and low-status people enabled their role as messengers. The contours of the religious landscape (including its relationship to the political) are addressed in many of these essays. Elliot Vernon's essay on the Presbyterian layman and author Thomas Bakewell follows Ann Hughes in taking seriously the role and experience of Presbyterians in the revolution, highlighting not just Bakewell's role in important disputes, but his commitment to a godly community, at the parish level, that enabled and policed the slow work of sanctification in the lives of individuals and his corresponding rejection of the lure of antinomian radicalism. John Walter's chapter reads a popular commitment to the active defense of Protestantism in the actions of troops against their officers in the Second Bishops' War. Anthony Milton starts from the polemic of the 1640s in which Presbyterians and Independents traded accusations of unprincipled conformity with the Laudian regime of the 1630s. Behind those accusations, he suggests, is a more complex picture of Puritan perceptions of and reactions to Laudianism in the 1630s than we are usually given, as new demands were gradually layered on by the authorities and many of Puritan inclinations continued to find (adiaphoristic) ways of justifying their reluctant conformity to them, albeit on different grounds from those endorsed by Laud himself. David Como demonstrates that the donors to the General Rising were, in terms of their later religious alignments, far from uniformly congregationalist or sectarian; the early "war party" was heterogeneous, and Presbyterians decisively tacked away from political radicalism only later as the cause was split by disputes over toleration and ecclesiology. While Jason Peacey explores the dynamics of local religious dispute centered on a puritan minister, Kate Peters traces disputation of a slightly more defined kind, looking at the remarkably sustained interaction between Quakers and Ranters in (semi-) public meetings through the 1650s. Her account explores the dynamics of leaders and followers and, while it emphasizes "the essential fluidity at the heart of religious debate" (238) it also serves to underline the stability and persistence of some Ranter meetings long after the Ranter "moment" of 1650-51. Taken together, these accounts foreground the interactions—hostile or more conciliatory or structured—between those of differing religious standpoints, the blurredness of dividing lines between them, and the local contexts for their experiences. The relationship between locality and nation is a theme in several contributions. In John Walter's chapter, customary expectations about troops being led by local officers are shown interacting with the more national politics of the defense of Protestantism. Both Vernon and Peacey explore the ways in which the local and the personal related slightly awkwardly to national perspectives and audiences when more local religious controversies moved into print. Both show authors (whether naively or purposefully) deploying partial information that could not entirely be decoded by a wider readership, but would be recognizable to those familiar with the context—clearly demonstrating the intended role of print within local dispute, even as it exposed issues to a wider readership. Many of the essays examine printed works, collating them with other evidence and interrogating the role that print played and the moments at which it was brought into play. The chapter most solidly focused on printed propaganda, however, is that of Thomas Cogswell, who documents a propaganda campaign in which shocking slanders (some of which had previously circulated only in manuscript) moved into print to discredit the Stuart family, in response to Charles Stuart's arrival in Scotland in 1650. Cogswell intends the chapter partly as a riposte to the claim by Kevin Sharpe that the republic failed to engage in an effective cultural campaign against monarchy. This brings us neatly to the question of radicalism, both political and religious. Again, many of the essays here have contributions to make, including Como's on the General Rising, which complicates our view of the genesis of the war party or political independents, thus throwing light on one of the earlier phases of radicalization in the revolution. Sean Kelsey's essay "Indemnity, sovereignty, and justice in the army debates of 1647" focuses on a later inflection point in the radicalization of those who would go on to demand justice on the king, showing how the issue of indemnity was far from a mere "bread and butter" issue that can be separated (as revisionists tended to) from broader ideology, and convincingly tying together various incidents in the complex army-civilian politics of that year to show how the indemnity issue, in some hands, drove a broader radicalization of constitutional thought. David Loewenstein looks into the intellectual influences on the Leveller leader William Walwyn, suggesting how different "our" Montaigne (an introspective examiner of the unstable self) is from Walwyn's Montaigne. Montaigne shared Walwyn's experience of civil wars stirred by religion, but Walwyn could deploy him provocatively (as an "honest Papist") to mobilize broader perspectives and thus question the narrow, local intolerance of some of his fellow parliamentarians. Thomas Corns returns to Christopher Hill's model of radicalism as the starting-point for a consideration of John Milton and Gerrard Winstanley. While not seeking to overturn the consensus that there is no evidence tying Milton to the circles of popular religious radicalism in the period, he points to the overlapping locales in London that Milton, Winstanley, and their associates moved in, and takes them as focal points for a discussion of the ways in which their writings might be seen to be in conversation. While emphasizing their shared concerns, he argues that in their readings of the Bible Winstanley moves further into the realm of "pure myth-making" while Milton's readings "keep the historicity of the biblical event in play" (188-89). The image of "conversation" used in this essay might seem a fitting one for the entire volume, which brings multiple dimensions of the historiography of the English Revolution into conversation with each other in a series of rich case-studies, and constitutes a warm, fruitful and energetic conversation on the part of the contributors with the work of Ann Hughes.