Drawing upon vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this study challenges traditional views of married life in eighteenth-century England. It reveals husbands' and wives' expectations and experiences of marriage to expose the extent of co-dependency between spouses. The book, therefore, presents a new picture of power in marriage and the household. It also demonstrates how attitudes towards adultery and domestic violence evolved during this period, influenced by profound shifts in cultural attitudes about sexuality and violence.

From its outset in the 1650s, the Quaker movement made extensive use of the printing press in spreading its message. This book explores how and why early Quaker leaders used printed tracts in their campaign. It reveals how the tracts were produced, distributed and read, as well as their role in the Quakers' dynamic campaign for religious and political liberty under the republican rule of Oliver Cromwell.

This book re-evaluates the nature of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in late sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland. Natalie Mears shows that Elizabeth took an active role in policy-making and suggests that Elizabethan politics has to be perceived in terms of personal relations between the queen and her advisors rather than of the hegemony of the privy council. She challenges current perceptions of political debate at court as restricted and integrates recent research on court drama and religious ritual into the wider context of political debate.

Offering a new interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, this book explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender. It asserts that late medieval Christocentric piety shaped the nature of the Reformation, and reasseses assumptions that the "loss" of the Virgin Mary and the saints was detrimental to women. In defining the representative frail Christian as a woman devoted to Christ, the Reformation could not be an alien environment for women, while the Christocentric tradition encouraged the questioning of gender...

This comprehensive study of political and religious conflicts examines the challenge to Restoration institutions by Protestant dissent in the London of Charles II's reign. It presents liberty of conscience as the greatest political issue of the Restoration and explains how the contest between dissenters and Anglicans contributed to the development of parties in 1679-83 that unsettled the nation.