The collective, integrated work of fourteen distinguished historians, this book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. European thinkers of the period may seem to have inherited a common vocabulary and a set of concepts, yet their concerns and their expression of those concerns were conditioned by the particular contexts in which they formulated and refined their ideas. The book therefore investigates the very possibility of a European political identity and how it was mediated and expressed across the continent. The only fully comprehensive...

For nearly two decades, Renaissance literary scholarship has been dominated by various forms of postmodern criticism which claim to expose the simplistic methodology of traditional' criticism and to offer a more sophisticated view of the relation between literature and history; however, this new approach, although making scholars more alert to the political significance of literary texts, has been widely criticised on both methodological and theoretical grounds. The revisionist essays collected in this volume make a major contribution to the modern debate on historical method, approaching...

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines three centuries of radical political activity and thought in England in an attempt to identify and isolate "radical traditions." Written by a distinguished group of international experts, these essays explore and reflect upon the concept of radicalism in political thought and action within a theoretical context.