THE DAVENANT PRESS

New Title! The Victorian High Church and the era of The Great Rebellion by J M R Bennett This study uses High Church books and periodicals to examine a neglected dimension of the Victorian historical imagination. Consciousness of the past saturated Victorian intellectual life. Present conditions were viewed in the perspective of what had gone before; and the past, or the present, accordingly found wanting. Totemic episodes in British history pressed in closely upon the participants in contemporary political and religious controversy. The seventeenth century was rich in provocation: the reign of Charles I; the civil war; the rule of Oliver Cromwell; the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution all inspired, in various ways, present-minded applause or denunciation. Historians have studied a number of aspects of the Victorian reaction to this heritage. Thomas Carlyle’s reverence for Oliver Cromwell is well-known. The complexities of the Whig version of the English past, and the changing responses of non-conformists to the political behaviour of their ancestors, have been sensitively explored. But one side of the argument – in some ways, the side that lost it - has been overlooked. Victorian High Churchmen, of differing hues, were no less voluble in appraising the seventeenth-century past than were Whig or Dissenting historians. The fortunes of the Church of England and the health of national religion, rather than an idea of English progress towards modern liberty, supplied the predominant organising principle of their interest in the Stuart age. High Churchmen tended to share a focus, but reached diverse conclusions. Archbishop Laud was judged by some to have been an Erastian or Romanising force in the English church: by others as the man responsible for its revivification. Attitudes towards Cromwell and non-conformity differed. The urgently polemical tenor of early Victorian histories mellowed as the century progressed. These divergences reveal something of how High Churchmen understood the Church of England and the world around them. ISBN 978-1-85944-033 9     Publication September 2010

New Title! The Manchester School of Zionism, 1910-1917 Chaim Weizmann and The Balfour Declaration by Josh Glancy ISBN 978-1-85944-032 2     Publication February 2011

William de Longchamp                                               David Balfour                    Lecturer , College of St. Joseph, Vermont USA                    Preface Ralph Turner,Florida State University  Bishop, papal legate, chief justiciar, chancellor -  and when Richard I was on a crusade, William de Longchamp was Regent. Loyal to the king and hated and envied by many, he was deposed and exiled after clashes with Prince John and the magnates who sought control in the king’s absence. This study presents a re-assessment of a controversial figure and examines the life of William and the Angevin context in which he worked until his death in 1197. ISBN 978-1-85944-007-0           July 2010           £19.99

Josh Glancy is the first author to be commissioned in this Twentieth Anniversary year. He is writing a paperback -  Slavery and the American Civil War ISBN 978-1-85944-021-6      £6.99      October 2010 Josh Glancy read History at Balliol College, Oxford. He was awarded the prestigious Gibbs Prize and is now a journalist on the Sunday Times writing on cultural and historical subjects. Illustrations from the Beauchamp Chapel St.Mary’s Church Warwick (www.stmaryswarwick.org.uk) are provided by kind permission of RJL Smith & Associates Rowan Studios Farley Much Wenlock Shropshire TF13 6PE Tel. (01952) 727255 Email: rjl.smith@btinternet.com