religious history of early modern Europe. His books include The Civil Lawyers in England 1603-1641: A Political Study; The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707; The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, which has been translated into eight languages; Witch-hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics, and Religion; and The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America.
Levack applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book focuses on the decision by the government of Charles I in 1626 to force his wealthier subjects to lend the Crown money with no guarantee of repayment. This forced loan, coupled with the imprisonment of five knights who refused to pay it, contributed to the loss of trust in Charles’s government, which in turn led to its collapse in 1641 and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649.Learn more about Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America at the Oxford University Press website.
Although this page touches on one of the themes of the book, which is the connection between the loss of trust in financial and political institutions, it does not provide an adequate statement of the idea of the entire work. In particular, it does not say that the book deals with the development of distrust in a wide range of political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions during the early modern period, which stretched from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Nor does page 99 explain that the book, whose main focus is Britain, also deals extensively with American history during the colonial period and that of the early republic. The last chapter also compares the loss of trust in the early modern period with the crisis of institutional trust in the United states and Britain in the last fifty years, especially in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
I would like to bring to the attention of the prospective reader two important features of the book that its brief descriptions by the publisher does not discuss. The first is the central importance of the seventeenth-century political philosopher John Locke, who is the main subject of Chapter 2 and in a certain sense the main figure in the entire book. Locke’s theory of trust, formulated in his Two Treatises of Government (1689) became an essential tenet of Anglo-American political culture.
The second is my argument that trust in institutions is more difficult to build and retain than trust in people we know personally. The reason for this is that the officials who staff central governments, judges of superior courts, directors of corporations, heads of national banks, and high-ranking clerics in national churches are known to most people only by reputation or exposure in the media. Building trust requires frequent interaction between parties, which is difficult to achieve between the members of local communities and the faceless “strangers” who run large public institutions.
--Marshal Zeringue
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