You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Offering a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought, Foxley challenges received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalization of parliamentarian thought.
Explores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.
Much ink has been spent on accounts of the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, yet royalism has been largely neglected. This volume of essays by leading scholars in the field seeks to fill that significant gap in our understanding by focusing on those who took up arms for the king. The royalists described were not reactionary, absolutist extremists but pragmatic, moderate men who were not so different in temperament or background from the vast majority of those who decided to side with, or were forced by circumstances to side with, Parliament and its army. The essays force us to think beyond the simplistic dichotomy between royalist 'absolutists' and 'constitutionalists' and suggest instead that allegiances were much more fluid and contingent than has hitherto been recognized. This is a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the Civil Wars and of early modern England more generally.
The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergenc...
Making the Englishmen offers an account of how national identities were construed and contested in the post-Reformation public sphere 1550-1650.
This Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new analytical essays on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution. Offering textual, literary critical, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to revolutionary writing and maps out future avenues of research.
The causes and nature of the civil wars that gripped the British Isles in the mid-seventeenth century remain one of the most studied yet least understood historical conundrums. Religion, politics, economics and affairs local, national and international, all collided to fuel a conflict that has posed difficult questions both for contemporaries and later historians. Were the events of the 1640s and 50s the first stirrings of modern political consciousness, or, as John Morrill suggested, wars of religion? This collection revisits the debate with a series of essays which explore the implications of John Morrill's suggestion that the English Civil War should be regarded as a war of religion. This...
Anti-democracy in England 1570-1642 is a detailed study of anti-democratic ideas in early modern England. By examining the rich variety of debates about democracy that took place between 1570 and 1642, it shows the key importance anti-democratic language held in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. In particular, it argues that anti-democratic critiques were addressed at 'popular government' as a regime that empowered directly and fully the irrational, uneducated, dangerous commonalty; it explains why and how criticism of democracy was articulated in the contexts here under scrutiny; and it demonstrates that the early modern era is far more relevant to the development of democratic conce...
English republicanism has long been a major theme in the history of political thought, but the years of the English free state are often overlooked. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the vast political pamphlet literature of the era, The Political Thought of the English Free State, 1649–1653 offers a provocative reassessment of the English Revolution and an original new perspective on English republicanism. Markku Peltonen explores the arguments in defence of the English free state and demonstrates the profound importance of the republican period. The pamphleteers who defended the free state maintained that the people, or their representatives, could alter the form of government whenever they deemed it advantageous, put forward powerful anti-monarchical arguments and widely shared the republican conviction that individual freedom could only materialise in a free state. Peltonen also highlights the unprecedented debate over whether the free state was an aristocracy or democracy and shows how, for the first time in English history, democracy was not only robustly defended but understood as representative.
European Contexts for English Republicanism offers new perspectives on early modern English republicanism through its focus on the Continental reception of and engagement with seventeenth-century English thinkers and political events. Looking both at political ideas and at the people that shaped them, the collection examines English republican thought in its wider European context during the later seventeenth and eighteenth century. In a number of case studies, the contributors assess the different ways in which English republican ideas were not only shaped by the thought of the ancients, but also by contemporary authors from all over Europe, such as Hugo Grotius or Christoph Besold. They de...