Images of Oliver Cromwell

Based on the unfinished magnum opus of the leading seventeenth-century scholar, Roger Howell (1936-89) this book also includes chapters by a team of leading international experts on a broad range of subjects originally planned by Howell himself. Published for the first time are Howell's studies of the reactions to Cromwell in the Restoration period and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Added to these are reprints of his essays on psychohistorical approaches to Cromwell and on Cromwell's contribution to English liberty. Further historiographical portraits of the Protector are offered in chapters by W. A. Speck, Ivan Roots, Toby Barnard, Peter Karsten and R. C. Richardson. Their chapters consider Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution; Carlyle's Cromwell; Irish images of the Protector; American interpretations; and the comparisons made between Cromwell and the twentieth-century dictators. The editor finishes by providing an appraisal of Roger Howell's place in seventeenth-century studies and a bibliography of his principal writings.This book will interest scholars of the English civil war and under graduate students of seventeenth-century history.