Books in the Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History series

This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.

This work looks at the reasons for London's freedom from serious unrest in the later sixteenth century, when the city's rulers faced mounting problems with rapid population growth, spiralling prices, impoverishment and crime.

This is the first full account, analysis and subsequent history of George Lawson's Politica, 1660-89. For long accepted as a significant figure, through his criticism of Hobbes and his possible influence on Locke, Lawson has never been studied in depth, nor has his biography been previously established.

Thomas Starkey (c. 1495-1538) was the most Italianate Englishman of his generation. This book places Starkey into new and more appropriate contexts, both biographical and intellectual, taking him out of others in which he does not belong, from displaced Roundhead to follower of Marsilio of Padua.

In studying the English polity in a period of crisis, Professor Cogswell challenges many of the revisionist assumptions about early seventeenth-century England and highlights the dangers in confusing the history of Court faction with the broader political history of the period.

This is a major investigation of the English Reformation, based primarily on original research in the south-west. Dr Whiting's controversial conclusion is that for most of the population the Reformation was less a conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism than a transition from religious commitment to religious passivity or even indifference.

Criticism and Compliment examines the poems, plays and masques of the three figures who succeeded Ben Jonson as authors of court entertainments in the England of Charles I. The courtly literature of Caroline England has been dismissed by critics and characterised by historians as propaganda for Charles I's absolutism penned by sycophantic hirelings.

Tracing the attitudes behind the enforcement of the criminal law in early modern England, this book, the first to be based on 17th-century legal records, beyond the county of Essex, blends social, legal and political history and offers an important complement to more conventional studies.

This book discusses the origins, impact and aftermath of the Civil War in Warwickshire, examining administration, religion and politics in their social context. The focus is mainly on the landed elite, but the importance of relationships between members of the elite and their social inferiors is also stressed.

King Charles I twice mobilised England in an attempt to enforce religious uniformity in Scotland, and both times he failed. The Bishops' Wars is military history in a political context. The book explains why the King could not reduce Scotland by force and concludes that the responsibility for defeat was his.

In early modern England, society largely comprised landlords and tenants, linked by the estate steward. Stewards, Lords and People analyses the role of the estate steward in the social mechanisms of later Stuart England. No mere rent collectors, the stewards acted as entrepreneurs, election agents, almoners, ambassadors, and conduits of their lords' patronage and in many other roles.

Catholic and Reformed analyses the preconceptions that lay behind religious controversy in the years before the English Civil War. It offers an analysis of the nature of the English church and explains the nature of English religious culture and its role in provoking the Civil War.

This book examines the day-to-day operation of the criminal justice system in Middlesex from the point of view of plaintiffs and defendants, and offers an assessment of the social significance of the law in pre-industrial England.

Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76) was the best-known judge of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, but he nonetheless rose to be Lord Chief Justice under King Charles II. This book surveys all aspects of Hale's work, and supplies fresh perspectives on revolutionary developments in science and religion, as well as politics.

Michael Questier's meticulous study examines both the individual and political implications of conversion. By discovering how people were exhorted to change religion, how they experienced conversion, and how they faced demands for Protestant conformity, this book develops a fresh view of the English Reformation.

Using a large body of newly available evidence, Dr Donald offers a new perspective on the power struggle in Scotland between Charles I and the Covenanters.

This book examines gender relations in Shakespeare's England by looking at women's involvement in lawsuits in the largest courts in the land. It describes women's rights in theory and in practice, considers depictions of women in court scenes in plays, and analyses the language and tactics used by women lawyers employed in pleadings.

This is the second and final part of an intellectual biography of the English republican, Algernon Sidney, which was begun in 1988 with Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677. It is also a detailed examination and reinterpretation of the major political crisis of Charles II's reign.

This book is a study of centre-local interaction, based upon the experience of the people of an English county, during a very turbulent period in their history. Dr Coleby combines administrative and political history, and establishes with unusual rigour and clarity the nature of the late-seventeenth-century English polity.

This book offers a fundamental critique of conventional views of sixteenth-century Irish history. It argues that reform rather than conquest was the aim of Tudor policy-makers, but shows that immense difficulties forced them to make administrative innovations which contradicted their original policy.

Attractively illustrated with polemical contemporary engravings, London Crowds demonstrates clearly the value of bringing together both high and low activity into a truly integrated social history of politics, and sheds important new light not just on urban agitation but on the nature of late-Stuart party conflict.

This book explores the cultural contexts of law-breaking and criminal prosecution, and recovers their hidden social meanings. It also examines the crimes of witchcraft, coining and murder, in order to reveal new and important insights into how the thinking of ordinary people was transformed between 1550 and 1750.

This book looks at the last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, conventionally seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. The book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous, and that it was during these years that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined.

Previous studies of historical writing during the early modern period have focused on authors and on their style or methodology. This work - based on a vast range of published and archival material - examines the social forces which controlled what was written, and the impact upon authors of readers and publishers.

This study of English forests and hunting from the late sixteenth century to the early 1640s explores their significance in the symbolism and effective power of royalty and nobility in early modern England. Dan Beaver examines how local politics became bound up with national political and ideological divisions.

This is the first comprehensive account of the development of the ideas on gender of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) among his English followers. It deals with English Behmenism from its reception during the Interregnum through to its impact upon William Blake and the Swedenborgians in the eighteenth century.

This is the first full study in fifty years of the author of the most celebrated political tract of the early years of the English Civil War. Parker's literary work is viewed in the light of his career as privado, or intimate adviser, to leading figures of the parliamentary leadership.

Examining aspects of law, history, art, drama and literature, this is an interesting interpretation of a hidden culture: the arcane world of the early modern legal community, its attempts to restrict governmental power during the period 1558 to 1660, and its aim to represent the order of an ideal commonwealth.

This is a major survey of how towns were governed in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England, based on extensive research in every borough archive and in the records of the court of King's Bench.

This is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation, analysing how ordinary people received, interpreted, debated, and responded to religious change. It differs from other studies by arguing that even at the popular level, political and theological processes were inseparable in the sixteenth century.