Illegitimacy: Family and Stigma in England, 1660-1834

longer processes could be addressed further. Indeed, a key conclusion of Peck’s book is the modernity of early modern memory. The conclusion draws similarities between memories of the civil wars in the 1650s and those of twentieth-century conflicts (including Burundi, Cambodia, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Spain, and Zimbabwe) in three areas: remembering and forgetting as processes of healing and settling; the treatment of key actors in a recent conflict; and the difficulties of authorities to control popular memories. Peck’s book is not just an essential study of English memories of the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars; it is an important contribution to debates about the nature of early modern memory, its relation to the present, and the challenges facing any post-conflict society.