| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Michael Bentley. Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970. (The Wiles Lectures for 2003.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 245. Cloth $75.00, paper $29.99.

Michael Bentley seeks to account for the transition from "Whig History" to more modern and professionally self-conscious forms of scholarship. This proves difficult, first because it is never clear when one ended and the other began, and second because it is not clear that they ever could be called distinctive schools of thought in the first place. Bentley reckons that "Whig," or "liberal," explanations of the English past—that is, those described by their master exponent William Stubbs as the continuity of national life and purpose—might be said to have passed muster as a "school" from the middle of the nineteenth century. He thinks "modern," or analytical, views might be said to have started with F. W. Maitland's 1893 corrective to Stubbs's interpretation of the Parliament of 1305. Not for the first time, Maitland found the evidence wanting. Medieval parliaments, it seems, were more king's councils than gatherings of the people. Modern historiography took many forms—social, economic, numerological, Marxissant, and totale—but whatever the form it always showed a sharp taste for evidence and argument. The trouble is, for all their professional combativeness, the modernists have been no more forthcoming than the Whigs in talking about themselves and their methods. What Bentley says of the moderns having a "cast of mind" rather than a doctrine could equally be said of Stubbs and friends.

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