Charitable Hatred presents a challenging new perspective on religious tolerance and intolerance in early modern England. Setting aside traditional models that seek to chart a path of linear progress from persecution to toleration, it emphasises instead the complex interplay between these two impulses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book examines the intellectual assumptions that underpinned attitudes towards religious minorities and the institutional structures and legal mechanisms by which they were both repressed and accommodated. It also explores the social realities of...

This book brings together leading historians of Catholicism and other notable historians of early modern English society in order to pull Catholicism back into the mainstream of English historiography, and to ask readers to suspend their assumptions and prejudices about the nature of Catholic history. Catholics and the 'Protestant nation' focuses on subjects which contextualise Catholic experiences within the broader framework of English culture, and is for this reason a work of significant importance to our understanding of early modern English society. By looking at Catholic readings of...

'This is a fascinating and very important book on conflicts and their resolution (or attempted resolution) within early Stuart London Puritanism. It has vital things to say about the complexity and contradictory potentials within Puritanism divinity and Puritan milieux. It challenges a variety of simple notions about Puritanism as either consensual/establishment/mainstream or extremist/unpopular, by analyzing a series of conflicts, encounters, and juxtapositions amongst London Puritans. At its heart are remarkable individuals vividly portrayed - the aggressive and paranoid Puritan minister...

This book explores the life, thought and political commitments of the free-thinker John Toland (1670-1722). Studying both his private archive and published works, it illustrates how Toland moved in both subversive and elite political circles in England and abroad. It explores the connections between his republican political thought and his irreligious belief about Christian doctrine, the ecclesiastical establishment and divine revelation, arguing that far from being a marginal and insignificant figure, Toland counted queens, princes and government ministers as his friends and political...

Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century' is the first full-length study of the republican Henry Neville as country gentleman, politician, political thinker, rebel and libeller. It traces the development of Neville's political thought from the English Civil Wars to the Exclusion Crisis and beyond, while also challenging the way in which the history of ideas has been conceptualised in recent years by discussing political theory alongside cheap libels, shams and poetry.
While studies of early modern English republicanism tend to focus on the Interregnum,...

This book examines the activities of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman, and using the approaches of the history of reading provides a detailed analysis of his mindset. Blundell was neither the passive victim nor the entirely loyal subject that he and others have claimed. He actively defended his family from the penal laws and used the relative freedom that this gave him to patronise other Catholics. Not only did he rewrite the histories of recent civil conflicts to show that Protestants were prone to rebellion and Catholics to loyalty, but we also find a different...