Mark Kishlansky

Mark A. Kishlansky (1948–2015) was an American historian whose scholarship concentrated on seventeenth-century Britain, particularly the reign of Charles I, the English Civil Wars and the development of Parliament. He taught at the University of Chicago before joining Harvard University, where he became Frank B. Baird Jr Professor of History. Kishlansky was associated with the revisionist school of early Stuart historiography, challenging interpretations that presented the Civil War as the inevitable result of long-term constitutional or social conflict. Instead, he emphasised contingency, political personalities and the relatively stable character of English government before the crises of the 1640s.

His major works include Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England, The Rise of the New Model Army, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 and Charles I: An Abbreviated Life. The Rise of the New Model Army became particularly influential for its reinterpretation of parliamentary politics and the emergence of the army during the Civil War, while A Monarchy Transformed provides a broader account of Britain from the accession of James VI and I through the Civil Wars, Restoration and Glorious Revolution. His biography of Charles I presents the king as a more complex political figure than the conventional image of an incompetent or simply authoritarian monarch, reflecting Kishlansky's wider determination to reconsider established assumptions about Stuart Britain.