Winston Churchill’s Divi Britannici (1675) and Archipelagic Royalism
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This essay provides a wealth of detail on (the first) Winston Churchill's Divi Britannici, drawing some interesting parallels with the works and career of the second Churchill, and noting how the latter made use of the former in his own historical work. I learned a lot from this article about an intriguing and under-studied seventeenth-century text.
The organisation of the article is confusing at points. In effect, it seems to start over several times, and there is a degree of repetition. The subheadings can be misleading: section 3, 'Biography', discusses Churchill's historical reputation and notes some of his stylistic flourishes, but his career is covered more fully in section 5, 'Divi Britannici in Context'. I think the essay would benefit greatly from clearer ordering (e.g. Biography -> Political and historiographical significance of DB -> Reception -> Comparison with the later Churchill), which would also permit some cutting for greater concision.
The article engages with a wide and interesting range of scholarship. It would be helpful to indent long quotations from secondary sources, to distinguish them more clearly from the authorial text.
Author Response
The key points in this report are that the essay "would benefit greatly from clearer ordering [...] which would also permit some cutting for greater concision" and that "It would be helpful to indent long quotations from secondary sources, to distinguish them more clearly from the authorial text". We have carried out the necessary revisions to comply with this reader's insightful observations.
Reviewer 2 Report
This article addresses Divi Britannici (1675), an under-studied Restoration history authored by Winston Churchill (1620-1688), the direct ancestor of the 20th-century British PM. The article’s various remarks about the text’s unique contributions are intriguing, and I can see how they would be of interest to humanities scholars in various fields. That said, this article needs extensive structural revision to make the argument clearer, more pointed, and more productive. Nine sections is far too many, and at least 364 lines of the article’s 1047 lines are dedicated to lengthy quotations—that’s excessive. In general, sources should only be quoted verbatim when paraphrase is inadequate, and block quotes should only be used when every word of every line is worthy of analysis and interpretation. Otherwise, the quotation should be chopped down, and if the author’s only goal is to prove that the content of the quotation exists, then a short, cited paraphrase would do just as well. Below, I go through the article more systematically, and then I offer my recommendations to make this essay publishing. I strongly, strongly urge the author(s) of this essay to take those recommendations seriously, whether for this journal or another.
The introduction begins with a discussion of “the two Winston Churchills” that, quite frankly, is very confusing—I understand the appeal of mentioning the latter Churchill to make the article seem timely, but as it is, this current opening has so much unexpected information that it’s distracting.
For this reason, the authors are better off starting their article with the sentence “Few people know that there are two Sir Winston Churchills” (line 25-26). After that, the authors should the biographical information for the elder Churchill that's currently in Section Three (lines 417-435), before stating something like “in 1675, this Churchill wrote Divi Britannici (1675), which addresses [xyz].” As it stands now, the authors refer to the Divi Britannici without explaining that the elder Churchill wrote it, perhaps because the authors mention the text in their abstract—but the authors should not assume that those who read the abstract will also read the article, or vice versa.
After introducing the text, the authors can explain how their attention to the text’s "archipelagic" or Foucauldian history helps us recuperate the text after it was unfairly dismissed by contemporaries as royalist hagiography. In explaining this intervention, the authors should be more specific about 1.) how the text performs its innovations, and 2.) why that matters in the larger realm of historical and cultural studies. The answer to this second question is up to the authors, but from my reading, I saw several possibilities. For one thing, the Churchill text’s emphasis on the Stuarts’ mixed heredity could suggest that a royalist theory could accommodate the notion of hybridity much better than one might assume from the traditional royalist emphasis on bloodlines.
Or, the authors’ big takeaway could be something else. at the very least, it seems to me that the authors could make a case that the eminence of figures like Milton and Defoe over the last 3 centuries has meant that texts deemed “royalist” have gotten scant attention for their ideas, and that such texts might have first expressed ideas that we have previously attributed to Whigs. Such a claim would have fascinating implications for scholars of Restoration culture, the British and Irish Isles, the anglophone Atlantic World, and Early America, among others.
Or, the authors might think there is yet some other big takeaway here—in any event, I don’t think that reading the elder Churchill’s text “into” the latter Churchill’s text is feasible for an article-length study. That requires a book. And, this article’s authors presume too much knowledge of non-UK readers who, for instance, might not instantly recognize that “Winston Spencer Churchill” refers to the 20th-century PM. I suspect many UK readers would pause at that, too. The authors are better off making this article about Divi Britannici, providing enough foundational information to be comprehensible, discussing its relation to similar texts in a more sustained fashion, and then extrapolating its relevance to the contemporary world in the conclusion. Even, then, however, this topical connection should be fairly general so that readers don’t have to process a whole new set of historical facts to understand the analogy.
In the process of explaining the unique contributions of Divi Britannici, I would like to see more sustained discussions of the text, rather than extensive block-quotes with minimal commentary. The most egregious example of this phenomenon that I saw was the 13-line quotation (lines 387-399) that was not analyzed at all—the authors just introduce another 14-line quotation (lines 402-415) without any commentary! In general, the authors should follow each block quotation with a paragraph of analysis that is just as long as that BQ—otherwise, the authors risk letting the text “speak for itself,” and if the text can speak for itself, there’s no need for the authors to speak about it, at least not for the length of an academic article.
If the authors are concerned about what to cut to accommodate this expansion of their analysis, I think the “book history” can be chopped down to a couple of paragraphs, as many of the lengthy quotes in that section are unnecessary—succinct paraphrases (i.e., “he didn’t like the book” to summarize a 8-line diatribe) with accurate citations would do the job just fine. Otherwise, the authors risk letting their quoted sources make arguments for them, instead of taking control of the study and explaining how their command of said sources will highlight the Divi Britannici’s unique contributions. The authors should also explain more succinctly how their “book history” of the text helps us understand their own argument about the text’s significance—if the authors cannot explain the thematic relevance of this “book history,” then it might be worth cutting that history or relegating it to a footnote. If the authors’ end-goal for offering that information was simply to make readers feel more familiar with the text, then they should probably think about including that information in a scholarly edition of Divi Britannici or some kind of encyclopedia entry.
If the authors are willing to reconstruct the study in this manner, I think they will be able to re-sculpt the latter sections to advance more specific claims, and after that happens, I will be able to tell the authors what historiographies they’re missing. So far, the study is too inchoate, but with more focus and stronger scaffolding, the article could advance clearer, more consequential arguments.
Author Response
This very detailed and scrupulous report led to a major rewrite of the essay exactly along the lines mapped out in the report. The reader asked for a radical re-sculpting of the essay, especially in terms of a comprehensive overhaul of "the latter sections to advance more specific claims". That re-sculpting has now been effected in order to respond to the reader's robust advice that with "more focus and stronger scaffolding, the article could advance clearer, more consequential arguments." Those arguments are now well advanced, albeit with the recognition that this remains a preliminary engagement with a complex text that calls for further elaboration in future critical work, in the context of the other contemporary historiographies invoked by the reader.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The suggested revisions have been carried out successfully, and the essay’s structure and argument are much easier to follow.
