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War in England 1642-1649. By Barbara Donagan. New York Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-928518-1. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 443. $110.00.
War in England: 1642-1649 is the long awaited culmination of the labors of Barbara Donagan, an independent scholar associated with the Huntington Library, who has been working assiduously on the subject for the last quarter of a century. For that period, a search of the Royal Historical Society's online bibliography on "English Civil War" produces 886 hits- I too was staggered. So the criterion for a new work must be its originality. War in England seems to accept this challenge. The dust jacket lauds this book as "A fresh approach to the English Civil war." Well, how fresh is it? Without doubt Donagan's work on codes of conduct, military education and atrocities, for example, is original, but its freshness is limited by the fact that her fine articles on these matters, some published as long...