Books by Markku (University of Helsinki) Peltonen

"The English Revolution has always held pride of place in histories of Anglophone political thought. The political writings of the Levellers and John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington, to name only the most obvious, were all shaped by, indeed in many ways the products of, the upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. It is simply impossible to understand their political ideas without the context of the English Revolution. Historians have pored over every aspect of political thought from the first controversies leading up to the civil wars in the early 1640s to the final debates on the eve of the Restoration in 1659-60, and yet there is one period amid these revolutionary decades which has captured scant scholarly attention. This is the period of the free state from early 1649, when Charles I was executed and the free state established, to the spring of 1653, when Oliver Cromwell and the army dissolved the Rump and eventually established the protectorate. This scholarly neglect is even more startling given the fact that the trial and execution of Charles I and the founding of the free state arguably marked the culmination of the entire period. Historians have of course examined the political ideas underlying these events and the whole republican era, but, although they often disagree with one another on many points of detail, they agree on one salient general point. Practically all of them, though in varying degrees, play down, or even belittle, the importance of the political thought of the republican period"--

Markku Peltonen examines the centrality of humanist rhetoric in the pre-revolutionary educational system and its vital contribution to the political culture of the period. He argues that humanism was crucial to the development of the participatory character of English politics and an important background for the politics of the period.

Arguments about the duel in early modern England were widespread. To understand duelling is to understand some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and this major new study will engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.