The book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive account of the collecting and study of coins in Britain from 1500 to 1750. Many new discoveries, such as the existence of a Tudor royal collection, have been made in the course of the research. In addition, important scholars and collectors have been identified, who are otherwise virtually unknown, such as James Cole, John Harrison, Simonds D'Ewes, John Marsham and Francis Sambrooke. The development of the early university collections, at Ca...
A reconstruction of the 'Strand palaces', where England's early-modern and post-Reformation elites jostled to build and furnish new, secular cathedrals This book reconstructs the so-called "Strand palaces"-eleven great houses that once stood along the Strand in London. Between 1550 and 1650, this was the capital's "Golden Mile": home to a unique concentration of patrons and artists, and where England's early-modern and post-Reformation elites jostled to establish themselves by building and fur...
A new history of English trade and empire—revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahma...
Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship implicitly or explicitly associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among th...
1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is safe inside the walls of the Calverton household as a lady's companion waiting in anticipation of the day she can return to her ancestral home of Measham Hall. But when Alethea suddenly finds herself cast out on the plague-ridden streets of London, a long road to Derbyshire lies ahead. Militias have closed their bor...
The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles...
A Brief History of Britain 1660 - 1851 (Brief Histories)
by William Gibson
Praise for the author:'Gibson's well written and well-documented account of James and the bishops will surely become the new standard authority on these "implausible revolutionaries" for many decades.' Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, Anglican and Episcopal HistoryIn 1660, England emerged from the devastation of the Civil Wars and restored the king, Charles II, to the throne. Over the next 190 years Britain would establish itself as the leading nation in the world - the centre of a burgeoning empi...
Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution
by Margaret James
Originally published in 1930 and reprinted in 1966 this book focusses on the social and economic developments of the Puritan revolution - aspects which are often overlooked in favour of the political. Using archival resources, this study shows that the period 1640-1660 was one of change and experiment in the social as well as political sphere. Particular focus is given to the depression in industry and agriculture and the resultant increase in poverty and unemployment. The extent to which the tr...
Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England (Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, #8)
by Josephine Billingham
Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England explores one of society's darkest crimes using archival sources and discussing its representation in the drama, pamphlets and broadside ballads of the early modern period. It takes the reader on a journey through the streets and taverns where street literature was hawked, to the playhouses where the crime was dramatized, and the courts where it was tried and punished. Using a regional microstudy of coroners' inquests and churchwardens' presentments, couple...
Sir Alan Burns was the most prominent defender of the British empire in its final stages. The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empires studies Burns' career and his arguments in defense of European colonialism. Bruce Gilley describes Burns' intellectual and policy battles with opponents of colonialism and his efforts to slow the decolonization process. The Last Imperialist takes readers through Burns' critical roles in World War I, the economic development of British...
A Year in the Life of Stuart Britain (A Year in the Life of ...)
by Andrea Zuvich
The Stuart monarchs reigned during a time when Britain was balanced on the brink of change. It was an era torn between absolute monarchy and revolution: kings ruled with iron fists only to be toppled by opponents who laid claim, not to a crown, but to a country. It was an era that saw the carnage of the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I and the rise of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, only to then witness Charles II's restoration, the Great Plague and the Glorious Revolution. In this...
Grace and Conformity
by Dean of Peterhouse Cambridge Stephen Hampton
The Reformed Conformity that flourished within the Early Stuart English Church was a rich, vibrant, and distinctive theological tradition that has never before been studied in its own right. While scholars have observed how Reformed Conformists clashed with Laudians and Puritans alike, no sustained academic study of their teaching on grace and their attitude to the Church has yet been undertaken, despite the centrality of these topics to Early Stuart theological controversy. This ground-breaking...
At the heart of the English Civil War stands the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria. She came to England in 1625 at the age of fifteen, undermined by her greedy French entourage, blocked by the forceful Duke of Buckingham and weighed down by instructions from the Pope to protect the Catholics of England. She was only a girl, and she had hardly a winning card in her hand; yet fifteen years later she was the terror of Parliament. We see Henrietta Maria in the portraits of van Dyck, and hear her v...
A ground-breaking new history of the English Civil War in Worcestershire which looks at the experience of local men who were recruited into the Royalist and Parliamentarian armies. The author gives a fascinating account of how the armies were raised, maintained and equipped, and records how major events in the Civil War across England affected the county. In addition, he includes extensive and revealing extracts from contemporary documents. The result is an authentic inside view of the impact of...
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost tells the story of John Milton's life as England's self-elected national poet and explains how the single greatest poem of the English language came to be written.In early 1642 Milton-an obscure private schoolmaster-promised English readers a work of literature so great that "they should not willingly let it die." Twenty-five years later, toward the end of 1667, the work he had pledged appeared in print: the epic poem Paradise Lost. In the interim, however,...
A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England's fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America.In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements...
Originally published in 1910, this book traces the political role of the House of Lords during the first half of the seventeenth century, from its early years of defending the constitution against the crown, and the subsequent conflict with the Lower House during the Civil War, to its abolition in 1649 and restoration eleven years later.
When Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) began writing in 1660 he was a young clerk living in London, struggling to pay his rent. Over the next nine years as he kept his journal, he rose to be a powerful naval administrator. He became eyewitness to some of the most significant events in seventeenth-century English history, among them, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (he was in the ship that brought back Charles II from exile), the plague that ravaged the capital in 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666,...
'A rattling good read' - The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu 2020 sees the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower - the ship that took the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World. It's a foundational event in American history, but it began as an English story, which pioneered the idea of religious freedom. The illegal underground movement of Protestant separatists from Elizabeth I's Church of England is a story of subterfuge and danger, arrests and interrogations, prison and executions....
An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophyAt the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury’s thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art—and why, despite its long neglect, i...
The fifty-odd years of Scottish history dominated by the Jacobite Risings are amongst its most evocative and whilst the last battle, Culloden in 1746, is deservedly remembered as a national tragedy, the first battle on the braes of Killiecrankie was unquestionably the most dramatic. It was very much a Scottish battle. The later Jacobite risings would be launched against kings and governments in London. Killiecrankie, on the other hand, pitted Scot against Scot in the last bloody act of the bitt...
He was the illegitimate son of a king, a gallant and brave military hero, charming, handsome and well loved both within the court and with women; James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, had the life many would have envied in the seventeenth century. Monmouth lived in an age that was on the cusp of modernity. He lived through some of the biggest events and scandals of seventeenth century British history, including: the Restoration of his father, King Charles II; The Great Fire of London in 1666 and the l...
Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658-1727 (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain)
by Edward Vallance
This book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere'. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically aware public by mapping shifts in the national 'mood'. Covering addressing campaigns from the late-Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, the book explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. It argues that beneath partisan...