| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Janelle Greenberg. The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward's "Laws" in Early Modern Political Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 343. $69.95.

Historiography is rarely as engrossing as Janelle Greenberg makes it when she places the debate over the Norman Conquest at the core of her analysis of English political theory during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her book addresses a significant question relative to political crises under the Stuart monarchs: as Englishmen fought a civil war in the 1640s, executed their king, established a republic, restored the monarchy, and changed monarchs without war in 1688, what historical precedents did the opposing sides cite to justify their actions? Greenberg argues that during these conflicts the antagonists turned to three medieval texts that enabled them to construct a national past supportive of their present divergent ideologies. The radicals—by her definition, those willing to use force against an absolute monarch—mined the Anglo-Saxon eleventh century for precedents valuable in their defense of Parliament's role in Tudor-Stuart government. These same texts and traditions also gave comfort to the royalists supportive of more absolutist monarchy. The "plasticity of appeals to the past" animates this book and forms the heart of its argument (p. 296). . . .

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