ABSTRACT
In the 1980s a new, conceptually confused, picture began to emerge of the historical development of English society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historians focused with renewed intensity on local and regional cultures. The great national and state issues-the Reformation, the English Revolution-began to merge, at the local and regional level, with uniquely local and regional fields-of-force. Terms like ‘Reformation’ and ‘English Revolution’ came to mean different things in different places. As discourses of English History, it might be said, they are aggregates of all the local and regional communities shaping and being shaped by politics of state and underlying secular trends. It is now conceivable that English History will be rewritten from the local and regional bottom-up.
