2Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille’s agenda is the following: while Lucy Hutchinson’s book has ever been reduced to its literary or moral dimension (as the work of the ‘ideal Puritan wife’), it has generally been overlooked as a major narrative of the Civil War. Yet, even before its publication, in the 18th century, the prominent antiquarian Mark Noble and the great republican historian Catharine Macaulay took an interest in the manuscript as an important source. Therefore, the author’s ambition is to establish (after Royce MacGillivray and Robert Mayer) Lucy Hutchinson “as a major historian of the Restoration in her own right” (p. 4). Moreover, she contends that Lucy Hutchinson’s “reconstruction of the past can be interpreted as a republican response to Restoration politics and contribute to enriching our appreciation of the Restoration counter-memory of the Civil Wars” (p. 21).

3The demonstration unfolds in six chapters: “Life-writing and exemplarity”, “The Memoirs and historiography”, “The Experience of the Civil War in Nottingham”, “Writing oneself into history: the paradoxes of Hutchinson’s agency”, “The Historian’s craft (1): Lucy Hutchinson’s art of narration” and “The Historian’s craft (2): Lucy Hutchinson’s art of digression.”

4The first chapter addresses the apologetic dimension of the book. The author shows that Lucy Hutchinson draws on the humanist life-writing tradition inherited from Plutarch, and informed by Erasmus’s stylistic guidelines in Copia (after Quintilian’s enargeia). This form of “particular history” was sometimes regarded (by Bacon or Thomas Blundeville for instance) as superior to “general history”. Narrating the life of an exemplary man was an instrument of moral edification meant to spur men to action. Hence, the emphasis on his personal virtue: his magnanimity, his prudence, his temperance and his sense of justice. Lucy Hutchinson’s portrait of her husband also seems to be strongly influenced by Baldassare Castiglione’s ideal courtier (Il Cortigiano, 1528) and Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governour (1531). Another source of inspiration for the Memoirs is to be found in the numerous Protestant godly lives published in the wake of the Reformation. All along, Lucy Hutchinson was well aware of the pitfalls of such a narrative: by following Erasmus’s rhetoric, she ran the risk of adopting the tone of Catholic hagiography. Still, the portrait she draws of her husband as “a Renaissance gentleman and a saint” (p. 36) stands in sharp contrast with that of the King.

5The second chapter inscribes Lucy Hutchinson’s narrative within seventeenth-century historiography and more specifically within that of the Civil Wars. According to the author, even though a new antiquarian paradigm bent on “impartiality and plain style” (R. Mayer, quoted p. 85) emerged, lives and memoirs written in the humanist tradition and based on first-hand testimonies should not be discarded altogether as they partake of the “culture of fact” which is so central to early modern culture. The author further underlines the importance of Bodin’s Methodus (1566), as well as Thomas Blundeville’s The True Order and Methode of Wriyting and Reading Histories (1574), and their clear distinction between rhetoric and history (p. 88-90). However, she argues that against the background of “this epistemological crisis, which coincided with the Revolution and continued after the Restoration, histories written by ocular witnesses despite their defects, continued to be seen as the more reliable” (p. 99). Such were the Memoirs of Colonel Huchinson. The genre to which it belongs is thus emblematic of a “polyphonic conception of history” (in England as in France) which aimed to confront testimonies in an age of great ideological divisions (p. 101-102).

6The third chapter focuses on the narrative of the Civil War vicissitudes in Nottingham, from Hutchinson’s appointment as Governor of the town and castle in January 1643 to the valiant resistance of the town besieged by the Newark royalist troops in September 1643 and January 1644. Lucy Hutchinson also describes the bitter divisions arising within the parliamentary camp, between the “wretched” Presbyterians and the Independents of the New Model Army. She accuses the former of siding with the king and preparing a “conspiration” against her husband and his brother. This aspect of the narrative, the author argues, casts light on “Civil War politics and on the final defeat of the so-called Puritan Revolution” (p. 156). Colonel Hutchinson’s relations with the London government (he reported in person to the House of Commons in April 1645 and became an MP in 1646) also illustrate the interplay between local and national politics emphasised by modern historiography: “every County had more or lesse the civill warre within itselfe” (L. Hutchinson quoted p. 161). As for Lucy Hutchinson’s ethos, “[her] characterization as the Colonel’s confidant… is something of a trompe-l’oeil in the Memoirs” as her privileged position as an eye-witness to the events allows her to “claim an authoritative stance as a narrator of history” (p. 123-24).

7The fourth chapter thus shows how Lucy Hutchinson’s self-portrait as a submissive wife and depiction of her “godly household” is part of a rhetorical strategy at a time when women were barred from politics and anti-gynecocracy ran high (against Queen Henrietta Maria notably). Such a posture served as a screen or “camouflage” (to use David Norbrook’s expression) meant to conceal a radical vision of politics and history (p. 172). In fact, the Memoirs reveal that Lucy Hutchinson did not only act as a nurse to the wounded soldiers in Nottingham, but also managed the Nottingham garrison in her husband’s absence. After the Restoration, she directly intervened in the course of events: she prevented her husband from surrendering following the Royal Proclamation of May 14 1660, and even produced a forged letter in her husband’s name asking for “his liberty upon his parolle”. This daring move (which proved fruitful in the short run) illustrates the deep connection between history and autobiography especially in the final section of the Memoirs. By writing about her husband’s life as a martyr of the republican cause, Lucy Hutchinson was subverting patriarchal codes of conduct and “writing [herself] into history.”

8The last two chapters concentrate on Lucy Hutchinson’s art of history writing in the Memoirs and in the Notebook which served as a draft. Even though she openly rejected fiction as the enemy of truth (chap. 2), she still drew heavily on the pastoral and the heroic genres: romance, with stories involving spies and traitors, confused identities and stolen letters, as well as warfare. Among these traitors, the worst of all is Oliver Cromwell, who is blamed for betraying his own friends and the republican cause for ambition’s sake. The author reminds us that if, by contemporary scientific standards such ingredients may undermine the status of the book as history, in the 17th century they were not strictly distinguished from political writings, such as political allegories (p. 214). The final chapter focuses on Lucy Hutchinson’s art of digression and use of satire, sometimes borrowed to anti-Puritan literature, to make her political point: this is particularly visible in a “gallery of portraits” exposing Henry VIII’s Caesaropapism, James I’s court as “a nursery of lust and intemperance”, “Archbishop Laud and his prelaticall crew” and ambitious Presbyterians who opposed the “tyrannicide.” While standing on the side of Puritans (in their advocacy of a further reform of the liturgy and the reformation of manners), she conveys the idea that the label “Puritan” (and the external appearance of Roundheads) was no guarantee of true godliness. This allows her to rehabilitate her husband and cast light on his republican “martyrdom” (p. 255).

9In this scholarly monograph (which was rewarded by the French Society of Studies of the Seveteenth-Century), Claire Gherraert-Graffeuille easily convinces us that Lucy Hutchinson should be viewed as a historian in her own right, along with some of her contemporary female authors: Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay in France or Margaret Cavendish in England. She carefully demonstrates that Lucy Hutchinson was indebted to the humanist and godly literature, as well as to the historiography of her time, while bringing her original contribution to it. As she told the life and death of her heroic husband, Lucy Hutchinson wrote about the Civil War and its long-term causes (notably the Henrician Reformation and factionalism, religious and political). But the Memoirs are not only worth as an “anatomy of the Civil War” (p. 147) and Restoration politics: they also bear testimony to the life and actions of a seventeenth-century Puritan gentlewoman. Claire Gherraert-Graffeuille, who has already published several articles and an authoritative book (La Cuisine et le forum. L’émergence des femmes sur la scène publique pendant la Révolution anglaise, 2005) thus pursues her exploration of women’s role as historic agents. As such, the book will be most invaluable to anyone interested in gender studies and in the history of the “century of Revolution” in England.