R. C. Richardson published his first book, Puritanism in North-West England: A Regional Study of the Diocese of Chester to 1642, in 1972. As he notes in the preface to his latest collection of occasional essays, Varieties of History and their Porous Frontiers, England's north has remained a strong interest of his, even though he has spent virtually his entire academic career in the south, in Winchester. Richardson's many books and articles have a number of connecting themes: religion, especially on the puritan/nonconformist side of the fence; local history; and historiography. On the last of these, many a student over the decades will be familiar with his very popular and clear guide, The Debate on the English Revolution, the third edition of which appeared in 1998, its title surviving discarding by most (though not all) historians of revolution, whether puritan or English, as applied to the 1640s and 1650s in the wake of 1980s revisionism.

All three interests coincide in the new collection, one of several such volumes of collected essays and reviews that Richardson has published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which has found a useful niche for itself in producing collections that include often hard-to-find occasional pieces—a service formerly more common but done decreasingly by the longer-established academic presses. Varieties of History includes eleven essays, several published within the past decade, two or three for the first time having been previously delivered as lectures, and a couple originating as far back as thirty years back, such as Richardson's introduction to his 1992 edited volume, Town and Countryside in the English Revolution.

Religion is the dominant chord in the first third of the book, including a treatment of one of Cheshire's Jacobean godly sort, John Bruen (1560–1625), known principally from the fulsomely pious biography by his brother-in-law, the Rev. William Hinde, an early entry in what was emerging as a major seventeenth-century genre, spiritually oriented life-writing. Southwestern Ranters get a substantive look, including a revisiting of the late 1980s debate over their actual existence inspired by J. C. Davis's skeptical volume, Fear, Myth, and History: The Ranters and the Historians (1986) (as might be expected, Richardson is unconvinced by Davis's argument). Another essay is a revised version of one that appeared in a South Korean festschrift, dealing with the relative paucity of writings, till the last couple of decades, on the 1650s (at least as compared with the attention to the 1640s) and speculating as to the reasons for this gap.

While some readers will be most interested in the essays that concern early modern England, others will be fascinated by the latter chapters of the book, which are devoted mainly to historians of early modern England. A few of these are relatively obscure eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures such as Georgian Winchester's local historian John Milner and, looking north again, the Victorian student of Lancashire nonconformity, Robert Halley. Prominent now-deceased figures names who appear include R. H. Tawney, his doctoral pupil (and this reviewer's own doctoral supervisor) Gerald Aylmer, and a host of icons of local historiography, led by W. G. Hoskins—who comes across here as a somewhat cranky figure despite his immense public profile. Hoskins was a prime mover in the establishment of the University of Leicester's department of English local history, which for a time included Richardson's own undergraduate mentor, Joan Thirsk. Herself a pupil of Tawney (and former Bletchley code-breaker), Thirsk's interests and openness to new methodologies ran wider than Hoskins's, embracing not only the agrarian past but also, in her later years, the history of women's involvement in the writing of history in England. Richardson's affection and respect for Thirsk, gives her (deservedly) as much profile in the book as Hoskins—each receives a dedicated chapter and appears in several of the others.

Among the most valuable services Richardson provides in Varieties of History is to restore a couple of neglected figures in local history to name-recognition status, such as G. H. Tupling, whose Economic History of Rossendale, a 1927 publication of the Chetham Society, was a pioneering entry in local economic history. (Tupling was one of a trio of early twentieth-century economic historians together with the better-known Manchester medievalist George Unwin and Tawney himself, who was three years Tupling's senior and died in the same year, 1962. Richardson makes a good case for the Manchester school of local history having harrowed the field of local history well before Hoskins set things in motion at Leicester after World War II). Another essay rescues from comparative obscurity the Irish-born but Hampshire-raised philologist Richard Chevenix Trench (1807–1886). A future archbishop of Dublin, Trench was one of the visionaries behind the Oxford English Dictionary.

If I have a single complaint of substance about the book, it is the title. “Varieties of History,” even with promised porous frontiers, is rather blandly generic and undersells the contents. If the word local had been inserted in front of history the volume's focus would have been clearer, though I imagine that the marketing crew at Cambridge Scholars Publishing would have resisted that qualifier as potentially limiting of sales. That aside, the book is well presented, and while a few of the essays bear signs of revision, they are for the most part reissued in their original form (which bibliographically is a positive). I spotted only one slight error, in the rendering of J. E. Neale's name (145), and a few instances where one or two letters in footnote titles had missed being italicized. While the price for a volume of little more than two hundred pages and only three black and white images is a bit high, those interested in any of the subjects discussed here will want to consider adding Varieties of History to their library's collection, and if they have an interest in historiographical subjects more generally, to their private shelves. It is a worthy reminder of the variety of Richardson's historical interests over a lengthy scholarly career.