Vallance, Edward 1975-

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Vallance, Edward 1975-

PERSONAL:

Born 1975. Education: Balliol College, Oxford, D.Phil.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Liverpool, England. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER:

University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, De Velling Willis Research Fellow, 2000-02; University of Manchester, Manchester, England, lecturer in modern history, 2002-03; University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England, lecturer in early modern British history, 2003—.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Harald Braun) Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2003.

Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation, 1553-1682, Boydell Press (Rochester, NY), 2005.

The Glorious Revolution: 1688, Britain's Fight for Liberty, Little, Brown (London, England), 2006.

Contributor to journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Edward Vallance is interested in seventeenth-century British political and religious history, as well as the history and historiography of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions and the ideas they fostered. He is the author or editor of several books, including Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, which he edited with Harald Braun. It is a collection of essays addressing European issues of the time, including the boundaries of Platonic love and the legitimacy of the insurance trade. Journal of Ecclesiastical History reviewer Jason Yiannikkou observed: "One of the book's great strengths is its interest in the peripheries of the period and the subject."

Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation, 1553-1682 looks at the way religion and politics were linked during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the concept developed that all citizens, and even the monarch, were joined together by their allegiance to God. Vallance addresses the issue through detailed research into the reading materials and religious pamphlets of the period. "Vallance's work shows how deeply rooted American political thought and consciousness is in the seventeenth-century idea of a national covenant," remarked M.F.M. Clavier in Church History, "binding on all including leaders, and its concomitant belief in the divine election of a particular nation."

The Glorious Revolution: 1688, Britain's Fight for Liberty examines the bloody, violent year that was pivotal in the fight for the throne of England between James II, a Catholic king, and William of Orange, a Protestant. A reviewer for the Economist called the book "entertaining, concise and well judged," while History Today contributor Robert Beddard remarked: "Vallance furnishes a quick moving narrative, written in a colloquial, at times racy, style. It is packed full of local colour and picturesque anecdote. For those who respond to the demand that history should be made ‘relevant’ to the modern world, there are plenty of quotations from politicians as diverse from one another as Margaret Thatcher, Marx, Orwell, and Hailsham, as he bids to engage the popular mind in the far-off happenings he charts." Malcolm Gaskill, writing for the Independent, commented: "Post-revisionism pervades Edward Vallance's brisk, taut and lucid account. Although the Glorious Revolution was not the coherent settlement its champions pretended, the effects were profound, not least in William's dependence on parliament to fight Louis XIV. Vallance also insists that we need to look earlier than the 1680s, when exclusionists and rebels first tried to stop the monarch dragging England back to Rome."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Church History, June, 2006, M.F.M. Clavier, review of Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation, 1553-1682, p. 677.

Economist, February 4, 2006, "Regime Change: Britain's Glorious Revolution," p. 77.

History Today, June, 2006, Robert Beddard, review of The Glorious Revolution: 1688, Britain's Fight for Liberty, p. 62.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, January, 2005, Jason Yiannikkou, review of Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, p. 160.