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An alternative account of the so-called 'succession crisis' in the first decade of the reign of Elizabeth I.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This is the first history of the espionage activities of the regime of Charles II. It examines the development of intelligence networks on a local and international level, the use made of the Post Office, codes and ciphers, and the employment of spies, informers and assassins.

John M. Collins presents the first comprehensive history of martial law in the early modern period. He argues that rather than being a state of exception from law, martial law was understood and practiced as one of the King's laws. Further, it was a vital component of both England's domestic and imperial legal order. It was used to quell rebellions during the Reformation, to subdue Ireland, to regulate English plantations like Jamestown, to punish spies and traitors in the English Civil War, and to build forts on Jamaica. Through outlining the history of martial law, Collins reinterprets English legal culture as dynamic, politicized, and creative, where jurists were inspired by past practices to generate new law rather than being restrained by it. This work asks that legal history once again be re-integrated into the cultural and political histories of early modern England and its empire.

How was the law used to control sex in Tudor England? What were the differences between secular and religious practice? This major study, based on a wide range of church and secular court archives, explores sexual regulation in London and provincial England before, during and immediately after the Reformation.

This original interpretation of the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750 highlights the unique ways in which adherence to the movement shaped women's lives, as well as the ways in which female Friends transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious and political culture.

'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.

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.

An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the politics of religion in later Stuart England and its global empire. William J. Bulman provides a novel account of how the onset of globalization and the end of Europe's religious wars transformed English intellectual, religious and political life.

This book, first published in 2006, is a revisionist account of the monarchy during the reigns of the first two Hanoverian kings of Britain, George I and George II. Hannah Smith engages with key debates over the nature of early eighteenth-century British society by evaluating the political and social function of the early Georgian court.

This is a major study of the 1549 rebellions, the largest and most important risings in Tudor England. Based upon extensive archival evidence, the book sheds fresh light on the causes, course and long-term consequences of the insurrections. Andy Wood focuses on key themes in the social history of politics, concerning the end of medieval popular rebellion; the Reformation and popular politics; popular political language; early modern state formation; speech, silence and social relations; and social memory and the historical representation of the rebellions. He examines the long-term significance of the rebellions for the development of English society, arguing that the rebellions represent an important moment of discontinuity between the late medieval and the early modern periods. This compelling history of Tudor politics from the bottom up will be essential reading for late medieval and early modern historians as well as early modern literary critics.

Explores the dynamics of opinion politics in the era of Reformation and Anglo-Scottish union - a period of religious and constitutional tension - through protestations, petitions, oaths, oral and written modes of public communication, offering a historicised understanding of public opinion and its rise in prominence.

This is the first study of how masculinity and femininity informed criminal behaviour and the treatment of men and women before the courts of early modern England. It shows that women were not treated leniently by the courts, and casts fresh light on the complexities of everyday life.

In the century following his execution for treason in 1683, Algernon Sidney became one of the most widely influential political writers - in both Europe and America - that England had ever produced. This is the first full-scale study of Sidney for more than a century, and the first ever study of his political thought.

This book is the first detailed study of Westminster politics in the 1660s for over twenty years, and the first ever in-depth study of the legislation of the 1660s. Dr Seaward shows how these drastic and dramatic events had changed perceptions and attitudes in British politics.

This 2005 book proposes a new model for understanding religious debates in the Churches of England and Scotland between 1603 and 1625. It argues that rival interpretations of scripture, pagan, and civil history and the sources central to the Christian tradition lay at the heart of disputes between contrasting ecclesiological visions.

By tracing the ideological origins of the Puritan migration within the context of the English apocalyptic tradition, Dr Zakai shows how Puritans transformed the premises of that tradition by rejecting the notion of England as God's elect nation and by conferring that title upon the American wilderness.

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.

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.

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 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.