The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639-1660 (review)

Stephen Manganiello writes, "My goal in writing this book was to create the book that you would pick if you had space on your shelf for just one book on the topic" (p. ix). An authoritative single-volume reference work on a complex period in British history ought to be well-organized, reliable in the scholarship it distills, and helpful in guiding the enterprising reader toward further study. Considering that there are already in print numerous dependable reference works on the British civil wars, the tome should also offer something new that justifies its purchase by institutions and individuals.

Encyclopedias are not like dictionaries in that the subject matter is dictated by an inherent organizational framework. In this volume, there is no guiding principle that explains why the particular topics, events, and people are presented. Similarly, there is little uniformity within the entries themselves. Biographical entries range from anecdotes to life histories. Manganiello conveys little sense of proportion, scale, or degree of historical importance in his motley assortment of entries. The Covenanters, who precipitated and perpetuated the conflicts to which this book is devoted, are allotted sixty-seven words. The differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars receive twice that coverage. The Ordnance Office, the central institution in the logistics of English war-making, is dismissed in forty-nine words. There is room enough, however, for forty-six lines of poetry to the coy mistress of Andrew Marvell.

Unwieldy (and sometimes irrelevant) extracts from unidentified sources are inserted into the text with little integration, sometimes incorporating quotations that are missing words. The occasional sentence breaks off unexpectedly (p. 87). Solitary sentences, unconnected to the preceding paragraph, are cast adrift (p. 112). The aggregate effect of this casual, sometimes careless, formatting makes the tome seem designed for browsing rather than for consultation.

Buyers might balk at purchasing this work on the basis of its organization or because of perceived hints of sloppy scholarship. However, the greatest factor working against the marketability of this volume is that what it offers is archaic and recycled. Many of the biographical entries resonate portions of the old (now superseded) Dictionary of National Biography, though they are not as comprehensive. The appearance of a second edition of the Dictionary of National Biography in printed and online formats renders the biographical dimension of this work obsolescent.

Rarely if ever does one encounter syntheses or effective summarizations of recent scholarship in the entries. "Newsbooks" and "firelocks" mirror the identically titled entries in Martyn Bennett's 2000 historical dictionary of the British and Irish civil wars. Manganiello's definition of the "grandees" owes much to Newman's Companion to the English Civil Wars (1990). Compare the entry for Sir Jerome Zankey with pp. 505–6 of Ruth Spaulding's 1990 work on the contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke. A pattern of information-gathering emerges.

Further, the presentation and reliability of the scholarship amassed are shaky, first because no sources are cited for any of the entries (in contrast to the practice in the Dictionary of National Biography), and second because when information was incorporated into the encyclopedia the author sometimes got it wrong. Take for example the maps on pages 61–62. They are taken, without attribution, from a work by this reviewer that was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. Manganiello has made minor modifications but unfortunately he has got his additions wrong (p. 62, the two battles of Newbury are confused with Newburn). Haphazard arrangement and carelessness are reflected in a strange inconsistency with the maps, as if specimens from several different sources were amalgamated. Variations in artistic style, legends, and resolution do not dispel that impression.

The unreliability of the scholarly content of the book is exemplified by a twelve-page appendix on the Royal Navy. Internal evidence suggests it is derived from printed...