Search Results

“... Professor J.C. Davis has written a book to show that the Ranters did not exist. There was no Ranter sect: no organisation: no acknowledged Ranter leadership. Those alleged to be leaders did not agree with each other on some points of doctrine; or they denied that they were Ranters; or they quickly recanted; or (like Laurence Clarkson, or Claxton, who acknowledged in his autobiographical The Lost Sheep Found that he had been known as the ‘Captain of the Rant’) might have been falsifying their own record for the sake of better setting off their new convictions (Clarkson had become a Muggletonian ...”

“... Dr Davis’s book is a long, careful and detailed study of utopian writing in England from Sir Thomas More to the end of the 17th century. He has interesting things to say about well-known figures like More, Bacon, Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised ...”

“... irrelevant or contradictory to the points they were supposed to be proving. Ten years ago, J.C. Davis offered a sustained rebuttal of his work on the Ranters, claiming that Hill’s standards for evaluating evidence were slipshod, that he accepted what he wished to believe and rejected what he didn’t Hill has been immune to criticism – a habit of mind ...”

“... is less clear what chapters on ‘constitutionalism’ (Howell Lloyd) and ‘utopianism’ (J.C. Davis), competently constructed though they are, are doing in this company; the latter does review a new and singular dialect of political thought, but one suspects that there was no international community debating for and against ‘constitutionalism’, and ...”

“... in the 17th and 18th centuries, whose decline is succinctly analysed in a monograph by J.C. Davis published in 1962, which, although its conclusions have been qualified by the more exhaustive researches of Dr Jean Georgelin, still furnishes an instructive example for my purpose here. The decline not only in numbers and wealth but in both the capacity ...”

“... on the walls that diners were reflected multiple times. One restaurant critic, Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, called it a ‘rendezvous of the more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ...”