General seventeenth century

While the DNB was being published between 1885 and 1901, the civil war did not yet seem to have ended, for it raised questions of authority, political tactics, and religious loyalty that were hotly debated within the governing elite, as well as among nonconformists who saw their pedigree as going back to the puritans. In 1895 there was, for example, a big public controversy about whether Cromwell should receive a statue at Westminster. Furthermore, Milton, Bunyan and the Bible were still well embedded in a popular culture that was by present-day standards historically very well informed. Add to all this the fact that many Victorians plundered history shamelessly for case-studies in morality, and this usually entailed repudiating Restoration values. All this helps to explain why the DNB covered the seventeenth century so fully. Yet it was also a century where self-consciously professional scholars, working for the DNB, were beginning to countermine these unhistorical approaches. There were S. R. Gardiner and C. H. Firth, for example, not to mention the literary expertise of the Editor himself, Sidney Lee. Such was the grasp of government and legal papers shown by these seventeenth-century pioneer professionals that their articles remain to this day authoritative and in certain respects unsurpassed.

There is much that is new to say about the traditional areas of research. What adjacent periods label as 'court history' is just as prominent here, chiefly through the new dictionary's pursuit of patronage and corruption issues, which span court, city and country. We now have longer and often more sympathetic articles portraying more complex, rounded lives with more space for such issues as patronage, corruption and cultural activity, and informed by closer knowledge of family and estate papers and provincial or diocesan records. Cromwell continues to excite controversy on both sides of the Irish Sea, and the new article on him deals fully with his posthumous reputation -- a practice that we have encouraged in the larger articles throughout the dictionary. The liveliness of current debate on religion in this period ensures that, although the 'puritan revolution' itself may be an outdated concept, articles on bishops, clergy and godly laypeople of all shades of opinion benefit from up-to-date scholarship and thoughtful re-evaluations.

Historians' assumptions and preoccupations changed significantly during the twentieth century, and non-metropolitan sources have taught us much. We know much more about the personal, family and provincial lives of men involved in politics, and we know that women's role extended far beyond that of the exceptional royalist heroine. Perhaps the new dictionary's most obvious advance in this period at the political level lies among front-rank politicians just below the level of royalty. There may be few new subjects at this level, but many existing ones have been transformed. These include, before the civil war, people like the much-vilified favourite George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and the leading courtier and patron of the arts Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel. The full impact made by such men has been recognized only since the DNB was published, and they now receive longer articles and much more rounded treatment. Extensive archival work by specialist contributors has also greatly enhanced our articles on men like James VI and I's chief minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and Charles I's adviser and lord deputy of Ireland Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. And given all that has been published on parliament, its members and its debates, our treatment of MPs is much better informed. Our articles on distinguished ambassadors benefit from the contributors' access to foreign as well as domestic archives, as do those on members of the royal family and politicians who were exiled for significant periods. We hope that our new and effective articles on influential foreign envoys -- the Spanish ambassador to the court of James VI and I, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, count of Gondomar, for example -- will be matched by others after September 2004.

Work by historians on the court and on patronage is reflected in an improved treatment of extra-parliamentary politics. We were able to use neglected local sources to improve the perception and interpretation of context, and bring fresh perspectives to bear. And we had to provide articles on the many subjects exposed as 'missing' by changing twentieth-century fashions in historical research: diarists, criminals, actors, provincial notables. In the process, the proportion of women among our subjects rose from 3% of the total to 18%. Even the lives of the fleetingly famous -- producers of almanacs, travellers, and innovators in gardening and farming -- have been transformed by drawing on original sources such as parish registers and wills for personal and family details, and on the Victoria County History for clearer local context. We have also found out much more about the second- and third-ranking clergy, soldiers, antiquaries and writers who abounded in DNB .

Other notable growth-areas include influential government officials who were not politicians (with much help from the late Gerald Aylmer), non-publishing but important clergy, theatre managers, and some notable merchants. Recent scholarship on estate papers has produced more provincial landowners in England and Scotland. And the official readmission of Jews into the country in the 1650s has been recognized with a clutch of new rabbis, merchants, and war financiers. The explosion of interest in early music has added many more instrumentalists, often Italian or German immigrants. Coverage of Ireland has been transformed: Catholic and Jacobite Ireland now receives its due, while Irish culture is more effectively conveyed, just as Scotland's distinctive institutions are better understood.

So in the seventeenth century a great deal has been going on. Yet here, as always, it is the detail that is seductive. Our offerings include a presbyterian child prophet who rebuked her elders and betters before dying at sixteen of an illness that could now easily be cured; striking depictions of harmonious and of discordant family relationships; criminals and the victims of persecution complete with death-bed 'confessions' or professions; adventurers whose existence may have been purely fictional; and semi-legendary figures re-created in twentieth-century films. I conclude with the flamboyant womanizing Edward Teach, more usually known as Blackbeard the pirate, who sported 'a massive beard, which he decorated with ribbons (and even slow-burning hemp fuses on occasion) to heighten his fearsome appearance'.

Brian Harrison