Anna Keay: belief

Transcript context

…How much of that was sincere belief, and how much was that simply an arbitrary marker that different interest groups struggling for power fixed upon, and actually, the Civil War is about the interest groups struggling for power? Well, it’s an interesting point. I think, if you’d ask that question of a lot of historians working a generation or two ago, they would have said it’s all about economic forces. It’s all about the class struggle, if you like. I don’t think that’s my view. We live in such a secular age, and I would say in the UK much more so than in the States, where, really, church-going and religious conviction is very much a minority pursuit. To reimagine ourselves or to imagine the world of 17th-century England where religion is such a strong force, it involves a mental leap that I think sometimes people have been reluctant to do. Historians working on this period, particularly in the mid-20th century, were really influenced, actually, by Marxist approaches to understanding the past. It was all seen as, this is the rise of this class. This is the mercantile urban strand of society trying to assert authority, to climb the ladder, and so on. I’m just not at all convinced by those arguments myself. I think religion was a very, very strongly held factor in people’s lives. You read contemporary diaries and so on, and it really is clear that people felt very strongly that wherever they were on the spectrum between absolutely Calvinist Puritan or a Catholic, in terms of the range that was around at the time, that personal conviction about what was right was really, really a big factor. I don’t mean that it was the only factor, but to treat it as somehow a cover for other motives is to do a disservice, I think, to the people of the age. Given how central the 17th century is, in your mind — including disputes over the Book of Common Prayer, does it go to Scotland, James as an absentee monarch — when you look at the disputes today over Scotland becoming independent, how do you see that differently than, say, someone who doesn’t obsess over the 17th century?…

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