CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH HISTORY

"John Locke (1632-1704) was a prolific correspondent and he left behind him over 3,600 letters, a collection almost unmatched in pre-modern times. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide social connections, his letters open up the cultural, social, intellectual, and political worlds of the later Stuart age. Spanning half a century, they mark the transition from the era of revolutionary Puritanism to the dawn of the Enlightenment. This book brings together 244 of the most important and revealing letters. Half of them are letters written by Locke (12 per cent of the total number surviving), the other half are letters written to him. If Locke's place is already secure among those who explore philosophy and political ideas, these letters will give Locke a new presence among those who are interested in the social and cultural worlds of seventeenth-century Britain."--Jacket.

This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.

"This original book examines the concept of the Devil in English culture between the Reformation and the end of the English Civil War. Nathan Johnstone looks at the ways in which beliefs about the nature of the Devil and his power in human affairs changed as a consequence of the Reformation and its impact on religious, literary and political culture. He moves away from the established focus on demonology as a component of the belief in witchcraft and examines a wide range of religious and political milieux, such as practical divinity, the interiority of Puritan godliness, anti-popery, polemic and propaganda, and popular culture. The concept of the Devil which emerged from the Reformation had a profound impact on the beliefs and practices of committed Protestants, but it also influenced both the political debates of the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, and popular culture more widely."--Jacket.

'Constitutional Royalism' is one of the most familiar yet least often examined of all the political labels found in the historiography of the English Revolution. This book fills a gap by investigating the leading Constitutional Royalists who rallied to King Charles I in 1642 while consistently urging him to reach an 'accommodation' with Parliament. These Royalists' early careers reveal that a commitment to the rule of law and a relative lack of 'godly' zeal were the characteristic predictors of Constitutional Royalism in the Civil War. Such attitudes explain why many of them criticised the policies of the King's personal rule, but also why they joined the King in 1642 and tried to achieve a negotiated settlement thereafter. The central chapters examine their role in the peace talks of the 1640s and assess why those talks broke down. The final part of the book traces the Constitutional Royalists through the Interregnum - during which they consciously withdrew from public life - to the Restoration, when many of them returned to prominence and saw their ideas vindicated. A concluding chapter reviews the long-term legacy of Constitutional Royalism and its specific contribution to the politics of the English Revolution. Throughout, the story of the Constitutional Royalists is set within the wider context of seventeenth-century English political history and thought.

Articulate and restless London citizens were at the heart of political and religious confrontation in England from the Interregnum through the great crisis of church and state that marked the last years of Charles II's reign. The same Reformed Protestant citizens who took the lead in toppling the Rump in 1659-60 took the lead in demanding a new Protestant settlement after 1678. In the interval, their demands for liberty of conscience challenged the Anglican order, while their arguments about consensual government in the city challenged loyalist political assumptions. Dissenting and Anglican identities developed in specific locales within the city, rooting the Whig and Tory parties of 1679-83 in neighbourhoods with different traditions and cultures. London and the Restoration integrates the history of the kingdom with that of its premier locality in the era of Dryden and Locke, analysing the ideas and the movements that unsettled the Restoration regime. This is the first historical study to examine commonalities between the crisis that brought Charles II to his throne and the crisis at the conclusion of his reign.

"This major new study is an exploration of the Elizabethan Puritan movement through the eyes of its most determined and relentless opponent, Richard Bancroft, later Archbishop of Canterbury. It analyses his obsession with the perceived threat to the stability of the church and state presented by the advocates of radical presbyterian reform. The book forensically examines Bancroft's polemical tracts and archive of documents and letters, casting important new light on religious politics and culture"--

This book is an intensive exploration of the hidden and mysterious world of the 'Family of Love' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The Familists, devoted followers of a Messianic Dutch mystic named 'H.N.', were passionately denounced by many literate contemporaries, and an association with extremism, subversion and hypocrisy has endured. The author tracks the English Familists into their houses, fields and places of work. The imaginative and highly detailed methodology makes possible an especially fruitful interaction with the past, and ensures that no single social context dominates the emerging picture. For instance, although the full extent of Familism at the court of Elizabeth I is revealed for the first time, the members there are discussed side by side with their 'loving friends' in the fields and fens of eastern England. This study is, however, most significant for what it reveals about the nature of wider society. The processes by which the Family of Love came to be represented to posterity are examined carefully and placed alongside less accessible evidence. This approach brings into play a compelling and hitherto unsuspected dialogue between the forces of hostility and the lesser-known forces of tolerance: one surprising conclusion is that most English men and women seem to have possessed an impressive capacity to tolerate known 'heretics' in their midst.