This innovative study explores the history of Puritanism and the history of reading in the long seventeenth century. Drawing on a wide range of significant but understudied source materials, it seeks to advance our understanding of Puritan or 'godly' culture by examining the place of reading within that culture between c.1580 and 1720. In contrast to long-standing claims about the connections between advanced Protestantism and emergent individualism and interiority, the book demonstrates the importance of communal and public forms of reading in the practice of godly piety. Andrew Cambers...

First published in 1992, this book examines the intellectual confrontation between priest and Freethinker from 1660 to 1730, and the origins of the early phase of the Enlightenment in England. Through an analysis of the practice of historical writing in the period, Champion maintains that historical argument was a central component for displaying defences of true religion. Taking religion, and specifically defences of the Church of England after 1660, as central to the politics of the period, the first two chapters of the book explore the varieties of clericalist histories, arguing that there...

John Foxe's Acts and Monuments popularly known as the Book of Martyrs' is a milestone in the history of the English book. An essential history of the English Reformation and a seminal product of it, no English printed book before it had been as long or as lavishly illustrated. Examining the research behind the work and also its financing, printing and dissemination, Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman argue that, apart from Foxe's zeal and industry, the book was only made possible by extensive cooperation between its printer, John Day, and the Elizabethan government. Government patronage,...

Fundamentally revising our understanding of the nature and intellectual contours of early English Protestantism, Karl Gunther argues that sixteenth-century English evangelicals were calling for reforms and envisioning godly life in ways that were far more radical than have hitherto been appreciated. Typically such ideas have been seen as later historical developments, associated especially with radical Puritanism, but Gunther's work draws attention to their development in the earliest decades of the English Reformation. Along the way, the book offers new interpretations of central episodes in...

Illuminating a formative period in the debate over sexual difference, this book contributes to our understanding of the origins of feminist thought. In late seventeenth-century England, female writers from diverse religious and political traditions confronted the question of women's subordination. Their feminist protests disturbed even those who championed women's education and defended female virtue. Some of these women, including Lady Mary Chudleigh and the Tory feminist Mary Astell, have attracted interest for their literary achievements and philosophical originality. This book approaches...

In the sixteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam led a humanist campaign to deter European princes from vainglorious warfare by giving them liberal educations. His prescriptions for the study of classical authors and scripture transformed the upbringing of Tudor and Stuart royal children. Rather than emphasising the sword, the educations of Henry VIII, James VI and I, and their successors prioritised the pen. In a period of succession crises, female sovereignty, and minority rulers, liberal education played a hitherto unappreciated role in reshaping the political and religious thought and...

This is an original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William J. Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the church's historical...

In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone...

This book assesses how print culture transformed the political nation, at the level of everyday political practices, habits and thought.

A major study of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, as seen through the eyes of its most determined opponent, Richard Bancroft.