This book offers an accessible overview of the achievements of Laudian culture, so much of which was destroyed in the Civil Wars. Some eighty years after the Reformation, the brief span of the Anglican Counter-Reformation in the 1620s and 1630s saw a revival of the arts in the Church. With the rise of a "High Church" movement, initiated by Lancelot Andrewes and propelled by William Laud, John Cosin and Matthew Wren, the arts of religion flourished once again. New churches were built, and cathedrals and parish churches began to install new furnishings that were appropriate to the ceremonial...

In his Second Defence of the English People (1654), reflecting on his career as a prose writer, prior to embarking on the composition of Paradise Lost, John Milton identified 'three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil liberty'. In retrospect he was able to find in his earlier writings a systematic exposition of the grounds of freedom, and a commitment to expanding its domain through publication and polemic. Taking initiative from both the history of political thought and historicist...

In Britain throughout the period there was a persistent curiosity about the origins of the nation and its institutions, inspired initially by the publication in 1586 of Camden's Britannia. A remarkable campaign of scholarship developed, which attempted to imagine the vanished societies that had once flourished there. What could be known of prehistoric Britain from its monuments and language? Could the lay-out of Roman Britain be recovered? Was it possible somehow to retrieve the language, religion, and laws of Saxon England? The answers to these questions often had a bearing on contemporary...