Review of Mark Kishlansky's "A Monarchy Transformed: 1603-1714"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, which an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I read this book several months ago, and don’t remember many of the details of the individual narratives, but these are some general impressions on finishing the book. 

This is the sixth volume in the (so far) ten-volume Penguin History of Britain series. As with many of these, this was a bit of a slog. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. The author, Mark Kishlansky, professor of English and English History at Harvard, seems eminently qualified to make this an engaging book, but it really isn’t. Some reviews have referred to this as a good “undergraduate history” of the Stuart period, and that may be the case; I would only want to read it in a class where information was also pulled together in a more compelling way. 

A period that was so riven by political and social conflict should, perhaps, be handled with that kind of history. I have always been more interested in intellectual and cultural history, which this volume (and, it seems, most volume in this series) ignores, though I’ve tried not to fault it for that in my rating. A reader who asks herself, at the end of the book, “How was the monarchy transformed?” would have a difficult time answering the question precisely because of the way Kishlansky wrote the book: as a series of vivid vignettes full of vibrant personalities. The changes that happened to the important institutions, however, are much less apparent.