This ambitious and interesting argument takes a genuinely fresh approach to a long-standard view of the period. Mowry is to be commended for taking on a topic, which few have touched, with such keen scepticism and assured capabilities in multiple disciplines: political philosophy, cultural history, and literary criticism.
Melissa Mowry teaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature at St. John's University. She is editor of Defoe's Roxana (Broadview, 2007) and author of The Bawdy Politic (Ashgate, 2004). Dr Mowry has held fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. In 2013, her article "Past Remembrance or History" (ELH 79.3) was the recipient of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies' James L. Clifford Award.