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  3. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research within broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers.

  • General Editors: Michael Braddick, University of Oxford, Krista Kesselring, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge

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81 results in Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

Page 3 of 5

John Locke
  • Resistance, Religion and Responsibility
  • John Marshall
  • Published online:
    07 January 2010
    Print publication:
    11 August 1994
  • This book provides a contextual account of the development of John Locke's political, religious, social and moral thought. It analyses many of Locke's unpublished manuscripts and relatively neglected works as well as the Two Treatises, the Letter Concerning Toleration and the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Professor Marshall studies the development of Locke's political thought from absolutism to resistance, and provides significant revisions to current explanations of the immediate contexts and purposes of composition of the Two Treatises. He also sets out major accounts of Locke's moral, social and religious thought both as extremely important subjects in their own right and in order to challenge many scholars' interpretations of their influences on Locke's political thought.

Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660
  • Ann Hughes
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    10 September 1987
  • This book discusses the origins, impact and aftermath of the Civil War in Warwickshire, examining administration, religion and politics in their social context. The focus is mainly on the landed élite, but the importance of relationships between members of the élite and their social inferiors is also stressed. Early chapters discuss the economic and social character of Warwickshire; a middle section examines the onset of the Civil War in 1642; and finally there is a discussion of the economic impact of the war and the administrative, political and religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s, culminating in an assessment of the significance of the Restoration. Dr Hughes takes a critical approach to recent historiography, and challenges the concept of a 'county community'. The book is intended as a contribution to a general understanding of the Civil War, rather than as a study of one particular county.

The Blind Devotion of the People
  • Popular Religion and the English Reformation
  • Robert Whiting
  • Published online:
    11 December 2009
    Print publication:
    20 July 1989
  • The religious revolution known as the 'Reformation' must rank among the most crucial and transforming events in English history. Yet its original reception by the English people remains largely obscure. Did they welcome the innovations - or did they resist? By what internal motivations were their responses determined? And by what external influences were their attitudes shaped? These are the key issues explored by Robert Whiting in this major investigation, based primarily on original research in the south-west. Dr Whiting's controversial conclusion is that for most of the population the Reformation was less a conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism than a transition from religious commitment to religious passivity or even indifference.

The English Reformation and the Laity
  • Gloucestershire, 1540–1580
  • Caroline Litzenberger
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 1997
  • This book examines the effects of the English Reformation on the full spectrum of lay religion from 1540 to 1580 through an investigation of individuals and parishes in Gloucestershire. Rather than focusing on either the acceptance of Protestantism or the demise of the traditional Catholic religion, as other historians have done, it considers all shades of belief against the backdrop of shifting official religious policy. The result is the story of responses ranging from stiff resistance to eager acceptance, creating a picture of the religion of the laity which is diverse and complex, but also layered as parishes and individuals expressed their faith in ways which reflected the institutional or personal nature of their piety. Finally, while the book focuses on Gloucestershire, it reveals broad patterns of beliefs and practices which could probably be found all over England.

Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England
  • Tim Stretton
  • Published online:
    11 November 2009
    Print publication:
    22 October 1998
  • This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.

Dismembering the Body Politic
  • Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650–1730
  • Paul D. Halliday
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    23 July 1998
  • This is a major survey of how towns were governed in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. A new kind of politics emerged out of England's Civil War: partisan politics. This happened first in the corporations governing the towns, and not at Parliament as is usually argued. Based on an examination of the records of scores of corporations, this book explains how war unleashed a cycle of purge and counter-purge which continued for decades. It also explains how a society that feared a system of politics based on division found the means to absorb it peacefully. As conflict sharpened in communities everywhere, local competitors turned to the court of King's Bench to resolve their differences. In doing so, they prompted the court to develop a new body of law that protected local governments from the divisive impulses within them.

George Lawson's 'Politica' and the English Revolution
  • Conal Condren
  • Published online:
    04 November 2009
    Print publication:
    22 February 1990
  • This is the first full account, analysis and subsequent history of George Lawson's Politica, 1660–89. For long accepted as a significant figure, through his criticism of Hobbes and his possible influence on Locke, Lawson has never been studied in depth, nor has his biography been previously established. Professor Condren here provides the context and the analysis of Lawson's major work, in the process re-dating it and providing a quite different interpretation from previous readings. A substantial section is devoted to the history of the text and its use in controversies in the period 1660–89, and there is some reassessment of the relationship between Hobbes, Locke and Lawson. The study also uses Lawson's text to reopen questions about English seventeenth-century political theory in general, and to prefigure a theoretical study on metaphor and political conceptualisation. The book thus operates on a number of levels, philosophical and linguistic as well as historical.

Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England
  • The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643
  • Tom Webster
  • Published online:
    04 November 2009
    Print publication:
    06 November 1997
  • This book reconsiders the existence of an early Stuart Puritan movement, and examines the ways in which Puritan clergymen encouraged greater sociability with their like-minded colleagues, both in theory and in practice, to such an extent that they came to define themselves as 'a peculiar people', a community distinct from their less faithful rivals. Their voluntary communal rituals encouraged a view of the world divided between 'us' and 'them'. This provides a context for a renewed examination of the thinking behind debates on ceremonial nonconformity and reactions to the Laudian changes of the 1630s. From this a new perspective is developed on arguments about emigration and church government, arguments that proved crucial to Parliamentarian unity during the English Civil War.

Thomas Starkey and the Commonwealth
  • Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII
  • Thomas Mayer
  • Published online:
    03 November 2009
    Print publication:
    13 April 1989
  • Thomas Starkey (c. 1495–1538) was the most Italianate Englishman of his generation. This book places Starkey into new and more appropriate contexts, both biographical and intellectual, taking him out of others in which he does not belong, from displaced Roundhead to follower of Marsilio of Padua. Beginning with his native Cheshire, it traces his career through Oxford, Padua, Paris, Avignon, Padua again, and finally England, where he spent the last four years of his life trying to fulfil his ambition to serve the commonweal. Most of Starkey's career revolved around his patron Reginald Pole, scion of the highest nobility, but Starkey (and many other Englishmen) managed to balance loyalty to Pole with allegiance to Henry VIII. Out of favour with the king's secretary after the middle of 1536, Starkey turned increasingly to religion, continuing to cling to his conciliarist and Italian Evangelical opinions until his death.

Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought
  • Behmenism and its Development in England
  • Brian J. Gibbons
  • Published online:
    03 November 2009
    Print publication:
    23 February 1996
  • This is the first comprehensive account of the development of the ideas on gender of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) among his English followers, tracing the changes in gender and sexuality in such esoteric traditions as alchemy, hermeticism and the Cabala. The book argues that Behmenist thought in these areas is a neglected aspect of the revision in the moral status of women during the early modern period, contributing significantly to the rise of the Romantic notion of womanhood and 'Victorian' sexual ideology. It deals with English Behmenism from its reception during the Interregnum through to its impact upon William Blake and the Swedenborgians in the eighteenth century. The book also strongly challenges received opinions on the relationship of Behmenism to the English radical tradition.

Catholic and Reformed
  • The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640
  • Anthony Milton
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    30 March 1995
  • Religious controversy was central to political conflict in the years before the English Civil War. Where earlier historians have focused more narrowly on the doctrine of predestination, Dr Milton analyses the broader attitudes which underlay notions of religious orthodoxy. Through the first comprehensive analysis of how contemporaries viewed the Roman and foreign Reformed churches in the early Stuart period, Milton demonstrates the way in which an author's choice of a particular style of religious discourse could be used either to mediate or to provoke religious conflict. This study challenges many current historical orthodoxies. It identifies the theological novelty of Laudianism, but also exposes areas of ideological tension within the Jacobean Church. Its wide-ranging conclusions will be of vital concern to students of early Stuart religion and the origins of the English Civil War.

Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions
  • The Mind of Samuel Rutherford
  • John Coffey
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    14 August 1997
  • This is the first modern intellectual biography of the Scottish Covenanters' great theorist Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600–61). The central focus is on Rutherford's political thought and his major treatise, Lex, Rex, written in 1644 as a justification of the Covenanters' resistance to King Charles I. The book demonstrates that while Lex, Rex provided a careful synthesis of natural-law theory and biblical politics, Rutherford's Old Testament vision of a purged and covenanted nation ultimately subverted his commitment to the politics of natural reason. The book also discusses a wide range of other topics, including scholasticism and humanism, Calvinist theology, Presbyterian ecclesiology, Rutherford's close relationships with women and his fervent spirituality. It will therefore be of considerable interest to a range of scholars and students working on Scottish and English history, Calvinism and Puritanism, and early modern political thought.

The Pursuit of Stability
  • Social Relations in Elizabethan London
  • Ian W. Archer
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    07 March 1991
  • This work engages in the historical debate about the reasons for London's freedom from serious unrest in the later sixteenth century, when the city's rulers faced mounting problems caused by rapid population growth, spiralling prices, impoverishment and crime. One key to the city's stability was that Londoners were locked into a matrix of overlapping communities, the livery companies, wards and parishes, all of which created claims on their loyalties and gave them a framework within which redress of grievances could be pursued. The highly developed structures of government in the capital also enjoyed considerable success in mobilising resources for poor relief, while the authorities so impotent against it, as the traditional accounts would suggest. This is the first effort at a holistic approach to interpreting early modern London society, based on the full range of London sources.

An Uncounselled King
  • Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641
  • Peter Donald
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    26 October 1990
  • The concept of kingship as Charles I understood it was challenged by the Covenanters in a struggle of protest over the government of Scotland. Although many aspects of this episode have received historical attention, Charles's own role has not hitherto been investigated in detail. Using a large body of newly available evidence, Dr Donald here attempts to redress the balance, and in doing so offers a substantially new perspective on the Scottish troubles in the crisis years of 1637–41. This study sheds light on the processes whereby Charles, with counsel and yet often in spite of it, tried to uphold his case.

Central Government and the Localities
  • Hampshire 1649-1689
  • Andrew M. Coleby
  • Published online:
    14 October 2009
    Print publication:
    05 November 1987
  • This book is a study of centre-local interaction, based upon the experience of the people of an English county, during a very turbulent period in their history. The work revolves around: the relationship between centre and locality, and the partisan use of local institutions and sentiment for 'national' ends. Dr Coleby combines administrative and political history, and establishes with unusual rigour and clarity the nature of the late-seventeenth-century English polity. Whilst there have been many county studies of the early Stuart and Civil War periods, few accounts hitherto have looked at the situation both before and after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Dr Coleby argues for the continuity of governmental concerns throughout the later seventeenth century, and challenges received wisdom about the relative local efficiency of Interregnum and Restoration regimes.

Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule
  • L. J. Reeve
  • Published online:
    13 October 2009
    Print publication:
    29 September 1989
  • This study of the character and policies of Charles I provides an analysis of the political crisis leading to his personal rule in England during the years before the civil wars. It fills a gap in the historical literature of the period by integrating ideological with political developments and English with international affairs. It is also a contribution to the wider European history of a critical phase of the Thirty Years War. The book offers a new way of understanding Charles by demonstrating how ill-suited his personality was to the workings of the political world. It also argues that Charles's innovatory rule created a new pattern of national politics deeply destructive in its effects. The book gives a gripping account of the king's willingness to pervert the due process of law in dealing with his political opponents, as well as investigating his failures in religious and foreign policy.

The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II
  • Andrew Swatland
  • Published online:
    12 October 2009
    Print publication:
    29 August 1996
  • This is a study of the House of Lords in the reign of Charles II. It examines the House's institutional and political activities, and reveals the vital role played by the peerage in Caroline parliaments. Andrew Swatland draws on an extensive range of sources to analyse the membership and procedural developments of the House of Lords, relating these to legislative, judicial and political issues in Restoration England. He sheds light on the Lords' relations with the king and the Commons, and assesses the contribution made by peers and bishops to the Restoration church settlement. He also describes the emergence of political parties, reinterpreting 'Toryism' and 'Whiggism' during the succession crisis of 1679–81. This detailed and balanced study is both a major institutional history and an important contribution to the history of Restoration politics and political culture.

William III and the Godly Revolution
  • Tony Claydon
  • Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 January 1996
  • This is the first extensive account of royal propaganda in England between 1689 and 1702. It demonstrates that the regime of William III did not rely upon legal or constitutional rhetoric as it attempted to legitimate itself after the Glorious Revolution, but rather used a protestant, providential and biblically-based language of 'courtly reformation'. This language presented the king as a divinely-protected godly magistrate who could both defend the true church against its popish enemies, and restore the original piety and virtue of the elect English nation. Concentrating upon a range of hitherto understudied sources - especially sermons and public prayers - the book demonstrates the vigour with which these ideas were broadcast by an imaginative group of propagandists enabling the king to cope with central political difficulties - the need to attract support for wars with France and the need to work with Parliament.

Henry Parker and the English Civil War
  • The Political Thought of the Public's 'Privado'
  • Michael Mendle
  • Published online:
    08 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 August 1995
  • This is the first full study in fifty years of the author of the most celebrated political tract of the early years of the English Civil War, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. Professor Mendle situates each of Parker's significant tracts in its polemical, intellectual, and political context. He also views Parker's literary work in the light of his career as privado, or intimate adviser, to leading figures of the parliamentary leadership. Parker emerges as a fierce opponent of clerical prevention from any quarter, a strikingly brutal critic of the common law mind, and a leading proponent of parliament's most uncompromising position, a claim to a species of executive power so encompassing (and so like the claims of Charles I) that it can fitly be called parliamentary absolutism.

Protestantism and Patriotism
  • Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668
  • Steven C. A. Pincus
  • Published online:
    01 October 2009
    Print publication:
    09 May 1996
  • Protestantism and Patriotism offers a fundamental reinterpretation of English political culture between 1650 and 1668. It is also both the most detailed study to date of the causes and consequences of the first two Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–1654 and 1665–1667), and a configuration of the English political nation which engaged in those two conflicts. Professor Pincus argues that it is impossible to understand the making of English foreign policy in this period without a careful study of its ideological contexts, while at the same time suggesting that accounts of English domestic politics which ignore the ideological implications of England's place in European political culture are impoverished. Because of the broad context in which the Anglo-Dutch Wars are situated, the book will appeal not only to specialists in English foreign policy but to all those interested in seventeenth-century English and Dutch politics and culture.

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