Books in the Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain series

A collection of sixteen essays by Simon Adams on Elizabethan history, centring around Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. -- .

This book looks at the genesis of the British national identity in the reign of King James I and VI. While devolution is currently decentralizing Britain, this book examines how the idea of a united kingdom was created in the first place. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland, and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain; and the cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages. The book argues that between 1603-1625 a group of playwrights celebrated a new national consciousness in works as diverse as Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, Rowley's The Birth of Merlin and Shakespeare's Cymbeline. While specifically Jacobean interdisciplinary studies are few compared with Elizabethan and Caroline works, Marshall attempts to redress the balance by offering a fresh appraisal of James Stuart's reign. By looking at both established and little known plays and playwrights, Theatre and Empire rewrites our understanding of the political and cultural context of the Jacobean stage.

A highly original and detailed study of an individual single woman in early modern England, based on a recently discovered spiritual autobiography authored by a never-married gentlewoman, Elizabeth Isham. Provides new perspective on women's writing, identity and status in the early modern period. -- .

It was 'Black Tom' Fairfax, not Oliver Cromwell, who created and commanded Parliament's New Model Army during the English Civil War. This is his first biography by a modern academic. -- .

This collection of original essays combines the interests of leading 'Catholic historians' and leading historians of early modern English culture to pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography -- .

A celebration of Englishness in the sixteenth century. Appeals equally to students of early modern history and its literary culture, presenting a view of 'Tudor England' and offering a firmer historical background to evaluating the English Renaissance.

A full-length modern study of the Diggers, among the most remarkable of the radical groups to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640-60. Provides a reassessment of the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley, a figure who has attracted great interest in recent years amongst historians, literary scholars, theologians and environmental activists.

This volume offers a variety of fresh and exciting perspectives on Royalist politics, religion and culture during the Interregnum. Between them, these essays are an important milestone in the recovery of the Royalist experience of the 1650s. -- .

This focused collection of essays on the alternative establishments which both Presbyterians and Catholics attempted to create in Britain and Ireland offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities within Britain and Ireland. -- .

This collection of original essays combines the interests of leading 'Catholic historians' and leading historians of early modern English culture to pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography -- .

Discussing the transition from a largely oral to a fundamentally literate society in the Early Modern period, this text examines English, Scottish and Welsh oral culture to provide a pan-British study, covering tradition, memories of the civil war, mechanics for settling debts and more.

In this history of early modern London, the essays range widely, covering the themes of polis and the police, gender and sexuality, space and place, and material culture and consumption.

This collection offers bold reappraisals of the history of freedom of speech in the pre-modern Anglophone world. It addresses the aims and effectiveness of official policies, the thorny issues with which contemporaries grappled and the claims that were and were not made about freedom of expression. -- .

How were cultural, political and social identities formed in the early modern period? This book looks at community and networks, the importance of place and the value of rhetoric in generating "community".

This is a study of the rule of Cromwell's major-generals over England and Wales during the 1655 and 1656, a period which had a dramatic impact upon contemporaries and has remained a powerful symbol of military rule down to the 21st century.

Including contributions from key early modern historians, this book uses and critiques the notion of the public sphere to produce a new account of England in the post-reformation period from the 1530s to the early eighteenth century. Makes a substantive contribution to the historiography of early modern England. -- .

This volume brings together 12 essays by Nicholas Tyacke about English Protestantism, which range from the Reformation itself, and the new market-place of ideas opened up, to the establishment of freedom of worship for Protestant nonconformists in 1689.

Charitable hatred presents a challenging new perspective on religious tolerance and intolerance in early modern England. Instead of charting a path of linear progress from persecution to toleration, it emphasises the complex interplay between these two impulses throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. -- .

Analyses the tensions and contradictions within the 'religion of protestants' that dominated great swathes of the early Stuart church. This book studies puritan theology and intra-puritan theological dispute. It also studies lay clerical relations and the politics of the parish.

Ideas about marriage, gender and the family were central to political debate in late Stuart England. This book shows how political argument became an arena in which the proper relations between men and women, parents and children, public and private were defined and contested.

This collection of essays offers a radical re-evaluation of the nature of crowds and popular protest in the early modern period -- .

Explores the history of the royal city during the civil war and interregnum -- .

This book examines the activities of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman, and using the approaches of the history of reading provides a detailed analysis of his mindset. The findings of the study challenge a historical determinism which removes Catholics from the mainstream of early-modern society.

Reassesses the national war effort during the Elizabethan wars against Spain (1585-1603). Drawing on a mass of hitherto neglected sources, it finds a political system in much better health than has been thought, revising many existing assumptions about the weaknesses of the state in the face of military change. -- .

An innovative book revealing the impact of print on social change in early modern Ireland -- .