Browse

This book examines the moral and religious revival led by the Church of England before and after the Glorious Revolution, and shows how that revival laid the groundwork for a burgeoning civil society in Britain. After outlining the Church of England’s key role in the increase of voluntary, charitable, and religious societies, the book examines how these groups drove the modernization of Britain through such activities as settling immigrants throughout the empire, founding charity schools, distributing devotional literature, and evangelizing and educating merchants, seamen, and slaves throughout the British empire — all leading to what has been termed the “age of benevolence”.

This book explores the connections betweenthe origins of the English empire and unfree laborby exploring how England’s imperial designs influenced contemporary politics and debates about labor, population, political economy, and overseas trade. Focusing on the ideological connections between the growth of unfree labor in the colonies, particularly the use of enslaved Africans, and the development of English imperialism during the early modern period, the book examines the overlapping, often competing imperial agendas of planters, merchants, privateers, colonial officials, and imperial authorities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It pays particular attention to how and why slavery and England’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade came to be widely accepted as central to the national and imperial interest by contributing to the idea that colonies with slaves were essential for the functioning of the empire. The book argues that the prevalence of African slavery in the English West Indies was not inevitable and did not occur in colonial isolation but was deeply connected to metropolitan concerns, politics, and conflicts.

This book unveils the enduring power of witchcraft, curses, and black magic in modern times. Few topics are so secretive or controversial. Yet, whether in the 1800s or the early 2000s, when disasters struck or personal misfortunes mounted, many Britons found themselves believing in things they had previously dismissed — dark supernatural forces. The book explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. It takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, the book examines an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia. This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state's role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

One of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, Edward the Confessor regained the throne for the House of Wessex and is the only English monarch to have been canonized. Often cast as a reluctant ruler, easily manipulated by his in-laws, he has been blamed for causing the invasion of 1066—the last successful conquest of England by a foreign power. This book navigates the contemporary webs of political deceit to present a strikingly different Edward. He was a compassionate man and conscientious ruler, whose reign marked an interval of peace and prosperity between periods of strife. More than any monarch before, he exploited the mystique of royalty to capture the hearts of his subjects. This book provides a much-needed reassessment of Edward's reign—calling into doubt the legitimacy of his successors and rewriting the ending of Anglo-Saxon England.

This book offers a brand-new look at “familial patriarchy” in early modern England, which was an era when it supposedly thrived. Canonical sources and sermons often urged the subordination of women, but this book shows that most considered the notion ludicrous. In fact, it shows that families experienced a constant negotiation of power, debunking the myth that they were ever universally and non-negotiably patriarchal during this era. This analysis will be intimately familiar to anyone who is part of a family or business, although it resists the urge to extrapolate conclusions to the modern day. Instead, it shows why patriarchy did not incite women's political subordination, as we know it in the United States. This, of course, has been an essential thought within decades of feminist theory and history. The book also shows how conflict does not corrode social order, but actually helps create it.

This book invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary people and their experiences of illness in early modern England. Previous scholarship has revised our understanding of medicine in this period by revealing the significant ways patients structured medical care. Sufferers’ choices, actions, and words played a crucial role in determining healers’ diagnoses and treatments. However, much of that earlier work has overlooked how everyday lived experiences, such as gender relations and roles, shaped the medical encounter. Drawing on firsthand accounts of illness in letters and diaries, as well as petitions, devotional literature, and medical casebooks, this is the first book to show how early modern sufferers understood and experienced their bodies in gendered ways. Women tended to emphasize the impact of personal relationships on their bodies, looking to others to understand or articulate their own illnesses. Many ailing men placed the social in the context of credit relations rather than affective relations, and highlighted their own physical processes. The book offers evidence of this broad pattern in a range of ways—in the stories patients told to make sense of their illnesses, in their explanations of illness onset, and in their articulations of suffering, time, and pain. Examining these cultural processes deepens our understanding of early modern health and healing, as well as gendered experiences more broadly.

This book explores image, power, and communication in early modern England and examines their importance during the turbulent seventeenth century. Tudor authority was constructed and enhanced by the representation of rule in words, portraits, and artefacts, and in rituals and performances. Although the new dynasty that succeeded faced many problems, not the least of which was the very success of Elizabeth in personalizing her authority, the opening of England, after peace with Spain, to greater continental influences presented a myriad of opportunities. Travel to Catholic countries introduced Englishmen, the English court, and the monarchy to the great continental artists, such as Titian, who had brilliantly fashioned the images of the greatest dynasties of early modern Europe. In the seventeenth century, the baroque arts in portraiture and the classicism long fashionable on the continent, and with them the stage sets, architecture, and ceremonies of the European royal courts, at last came to England and in canvas and stone, in stage designs and mises-en-scène, transformed the representation of English kingship. This study examines the attempts by a series of regimes in seventeenth-century England to represent themselves in the most favorable light: to win support for particular courses, and to secure and enhance their authority. It studies the image of rule in words, visuals, and performances, and briefly looks at other and counter-representations as a means of evaluating the measure of success rulers had in projecting their authority.

This book presents the life of John Knox, a leader of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Scotland. Based in large part on previously unavailable sources, including the recently discovered papers of Knox's close friend and colleague Christopher Goodman, this biography challenges the traditionally held stereotype of this founder of the Presbyterian denomination as a strident and misogynist religious reformer whose influence rarely extended beyond Scotland. It maintains instead that John Knox relied heavily on the support of his “godly sisters” and conferred as well as argued with Mary, Queen of Scots. He was a proud member of the European community of Reformed Churches and deeply involved in the religious Reformations within England, Ireland, France, Switzerland, and the Holy Roman Empire. Casting new light on the public and private personas of a highly complex, difficult, and hugely compelling individual, this study offers a vivid portrait of this renowned Scottish preacher and prophet who had a seismic impact on religion and society.

During the course of his short but extraordinary life, John Ledyard (1751–1789) came into contact with some of the most remarkable figures of his era: the British explorer Captain James Cook, American financier Robert Morris, Revolutionary naval commander John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others. He lived and traveled in remarkable places as well, journeying from the New England backcountry to Tahiti, Hawaii, the American Northwest coast, Alaska, and the Russian Far East. This biography offers not only a full account of Ledyard's eventful life but also an illuminating view of the late eighteenth-century world in which he lived. It shows that Ledyard was both a product of empire and an agent in its creation, and that through this adventurer's life, it is possible to discern the many ways in which empire shaped the lives of nations, peoples, and individuals in the era of the American Revolution, the world's first modern revolt against empire.

After the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748, thousands of unemployed, including soldiers and seamen, found themselves on the streets of London ready to roister and steal. This book explores the moral panic associated with the rapid demobilization aftermath the War of Austrian Succession. Through interlocking stories of duels, highway robberies, smuggling, riots, binge drinking, and even two earthquakes, it captures the anxieties of a half-decade, and assesses the social reforms contemporaries framed and imagined to deal with the crisis. Later, the book also argues that in addressing these events, contemporaries not only endorsed the traditional sanction of public executions, but also wrestled with the problem of expanding the parameters of government to include practices and institutions, we now regard as commonplace: censuses, the regularization of marriage through uniform methods of registration, penitentiaries, and police forces.

A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. This book uncovers the untold story of how a secret history of courtly poisoning shaped and reflected the political conflicts that would eventually plunge the British Isles into civil war and revolution. Illuminating many hitherto obscure aspects of early modern political culture, this book presents both a fascinating story of political intrigue and a major exploration of the forces that destroyed the Stuart monarchy.

This book focuses on the murder of Mr. Grebell that was done by John Breads in East Sussex, England. The killing and the subsequent trial connect to broader issues in the history of the Sussex port, issues that affected other small towns in early modern England. The author narrates a story of personal violence and judicial vengeance. As such, the book provides access to the tensions and animosities that existed among people who jostled up against one another in the restricted space of a small urban community. It casts a harsh light on the transition from the narrowly focused community norms of the Reformation period to the more expansive ideals of a commercial society, and tells us about the elusive character of Allen Grebell. Grebell gives the impression of being a relatively generous and compassionate man, especially when compared with his self-aggrandizing brother-in-law. The book elaborates how the crime of John Breads connects with the wider context of social change in early modern Rye and also focuses on oligarchy at Rye, which signified government by a narrow, more or less self-perpetuating elite of men whose power was based more on wealth and economic influence than on inherited status.

To many in the United Kingdom, the British public school remains the disliked and mistrusted embodiment of privilege and elitism. They have educated many of the country's top bankers and politicians over the centuries right up to the present, including the current prime minister. This vibrant history of Great Britain's public schools, from the foundation of Winchester College in 1382 to the modern day, offers a fresh reappraisal of the controversial educational system. The author argues that public schools are, in fact, good for the nation and are presently enjoying their true “Golden Age,” countering the long-held belief that these institutions achieved their greatest glory during Great Britain's Victorian Era. The book is rife with colorful stories of schoolboy revolts, eccentric heads, shocking corruption, and financial collapse. The author's thoughtful appreciation of these learning establishments follows the progression of public schools from their sometimes brutal and inglorious pasts through their present incarnations as vital contributors to the economic, scientific, and political future of the country.

Stories of plots, sham plots, and the citizen-informers who discovered them are at the centre of this study of the turbulent decade following the Revolution of 1688. Most studies of the Glorious Revolution focus on its causes or long-term effects, but this one instead zeroes in on the early years when the survival of the new regime was in doubt. By encouraging informers, imposing loyalty oaths, suspending habeas corpus, and delaying the long-promised reform of treason trial procedure, the Williamite regime protected itself from enemies and cemented its bonds with supporters, but also put its own credibility at risk.

How much does the Thomas Cromwell of popular novels and television series resemble the real Cromwell? This meticulous study of Cromwell's early political career expands and revises what has been understood concerning the life and talents of Henry VIII's chief minister. The author provides a new and enlightening account of Cromwell's rise to power, his influence on the king, his role in the Reformation, and his impact on the future of the nation. Controversially, the author depicts Cromwell not as the fervent evangelical, Machiavellian politician, or the revolutionary administrator that earlier historians have perceived. Instead he reveals Cromwell as a highly capable and efficient servant of the Crown, rising to power not by masterminding Henry VIII's split with Rome but rather by dint of exceptional skills as an administrator.

A riveting look at how the early modern world revolutionized sleep and its relation to body, mind, soul, and society Drawing on diverse archival sources and material artifacts, Handley reveals that the way we sleep is as dependent on culture as it is on biological and environmental factors. After 1660 the accepted notion that sleepers lay at the mercy of natural forces and supernatural agents was challenged by new medical thinking about sleep’s relationship to the nervous system. This breakthrough coincided with radical changes shaping everything from sleeping hours to bedchambers. Handley’s illuminating work documents a major evolution in our conscious understanding of the unconscious.

Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a “Second Hundred Years” War. Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order? This book reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability.

This history of the men who directed and determined the outcome of the mid-seventeenth-century British wars—from Cromwell, Fairfax, and Essex to many more lesser-known figures—offers an assessment of the leadership and importance of command in the civil wars. It describes the role of the generals in achieving victory for Parliament. Further, the battle between king's army and vanguard of Essex is discussed. The book elaborates the situation of the war between field army and the enemy army into the south-eastern corner of England, the different aspects of the Marston Moor campaign in England, and the warfare in Scotland and Ireland during 1642 to 1648. It examines how the generals prepared for, fought in, and followed up a battle, and provides an appraisal of the performance of individual commanders set against their peers and across the period.