In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and religious thinker. The result is a Milton very different from most popular representations: instead of a gloomy, sexless "Puritan", we have a dashingly thinker, branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine.
‘It is hard to write the history of the British Isles in these years as anything other than a success story.’In reality, nothing about these successes was preordained.In the mid seventeenth century the British Isles were marginal to Europe. A warring group of islands, frequently the scene of catastrophe, they counted for less than the sum of their parts. Yet, by 1832, the reverse was true. United politically as never before, these isles thrived when their European neighbours were torn by war and...
Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate, David Evans-Po...
Return to Treasure Island and the Search for Captain Kidd
by Barry Clifford and Paul Perry
Property, Liberty, and Self-Ownership in Seventeenth-Century England
by Lorenzo Sabbadini
The concept of self-ownership was first articulated in anglophone political thought in the decades between the outbreak of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. This book traces the emergence and evolution of self-ownership over the course of this period, culminating in a reinterpretation of John Locke's celebrated but widely misunderstood idea that "every Man has a Property in his own Person." Often viewed through the prism of libertarian political thought, self-ownership has its r...
The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context
This collection of essays on Scottish witchcraft and witch-hunting, covers the whole period of the Scottish witch-hunt, from the mid-16th century to the early 18th. It includes studies of particular witchcraft panics such as a reassessment of the role of King James VI, and Covers a wide range of topics concerned with Scottish witch-hunting and places it in the context of other topics such as gender relations, folklore, magic and healing, and moral regulation by the church and state. The work Pro...
This comprises the household accounts of the only noble family then resident in Devon. Remarkable for their richness and diversity, the collection of documents has not been previously published and will considerably add to our understanding of the county's social history in the seventeenth century. The rare survival of parallel London and provincial accounts allows invaluable comparisons and analysis which will be of wide appeal. The accounts recorded thehousehold's very fabric from the servants...
Revolution Remembered (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain)
by Edward Legon
After the Restoration, parliamentarians continued to identify with the decisions to oppose and resist crown and established church. This was despite the fact that expressing such views between 1660 and 1688 was to open oneself to charges of sedition or treason. This book uses approaches from the field of memory studies to examine 'seditious memories' in seventeenth-century Britain, asking why people were prepared to take the risk of voicing them in public. It argues that such activities were mor...
Empire and Enterprise (Studies in Early Modern Irish History)
by David Brown.
This book is about the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. Meeting secretly at Grocers Hall in London from 1642 to 1660, they laid the foundations of England's empire and modern fiscal state. But a dispute over their Irish land entitlements led them...
Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain)
by Richard Cust and Peter Lake
This book revisits the county study as a way of understanding the dynamics of civil war in England during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a 'county community'. It also investigates how the county's governing elite and puritan religious establishment responded to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I's Personal Rule. The second half of the book provi...
Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. King of England, claimant King of France, Lord - and later King - of Ireland, Supreme Head of the Church of England and, perhaps most famously, six times a husband, Henry VIII is England's most notorious monarch. Succeeding his father, Henry VII, he allied with the Holy Roman Emperor and began his many obsessive invasions of France. Meanwhile the handsome, worldly king embarked on his famous quests for a suitable wife and...
'Enchanting' Simon Russell Beale --- 'Remarkable' James Shapiro'Wonderful . . . compulsively readable' Nicholas HytnerWhy do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday?When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke, described in My Year Off, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. Unable to travel or move as he used to, McCrum found the First Folio became his 'book of lif...
Laughing Histories breaks new ground by exploring moments of laughter in early modern Europe, showing how laughter was inflected by gender and social power. "I dearly love a laugh," declared Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her wit won the heart of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy. Yet the widely read Earl of Chesterfield asserted that only "the mob" would laugh out loud; the gentleman should merely smile. This literary contrast raises important historical questions: how did social rules c...
Revolution, the fourth volume of Peter Ackroyd's enthralling History of England begins in 1688 with a revolution and ends in 1815 with a famous victory. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George III, and England was - again -at war with France, a war that would end with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Late Stuart and Georgian England mark...
Queen Anne was one of Britain's most remarkable monarchs. With a personal life riven by passion, illness and intrigue - she presided over some of the most momentous events in British history. Like books by Antonia Fraser or Amanda Foreman and based on years of original research, Queen Anne is historical biography at its best. WINNER OF 2013 ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY In 1702, fourteen years after she helped oust her father from his throne and deprived h...
The Country House Kitchen 1650-1900
by Pamela A Sambrook and Peter Brears
The kitchen was very much the heart of the home in country houses the length and breadth of Britain. Although this hive of activity was kept behind closed doors and often hidden away in the bowels of vast mansions, these rooms ensured that the house and those who lived in it were provisioned. Country houses were formerly self-sufficient to an incredible degree, requiring a range of purpose-built accommodation for food storage and a hierarchy of servants with unique skills. From brewing and ba...
The 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic remains a unique event: the only time the Organization of American States has intervened with force on a member state's territory. It is also a classic example of a U.S. military operation that drew in America's hemispheric allies. Finally, its outcome was that rare feat in the annals of diplomacy -- a peaceful political settlement of a civil war. Here for the first time is the full story of that action, as told by one of its leading participa...
A Short History of the Lordship and Baronage of Nova Scotia
by Gerald a McKinnon
The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain (Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800)
by Richard Blakemore and James Davey
“The period of the English Civil Wars (1642–51) was one of the most momentous in British history. Never before had the institution of monarchy been so fundamentally challenged. Never before had a monarch been executed. Truly the natural order had been turned upside down.” This book provides insight and perspective about the lives, vanities, and relationships of those who fought in the English Civil Wars through the filter of portraiture, much of it painted as conflict raged. Roundhead agains...
Catherine of Braganza – Charles II`s Restoration Queen
by Sarah-Beth Watkins
Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess, married Charles II in 1662 and became the merry monarch's Restoration queen. Yet life for her was not so merry - she put up with the king's many mistresses and continuous plots to remove her from the throne. She lived through times of war, plague and fire. Catherine's marriage saw many trials and tribulations including her inability to produce an heir. Yet Charles supported his queen throughout the Restoration, remaining devoted to her no matter what...
Although it was the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown is too often overlooked in the writing of American history. Founded thirteen years before the Mayflower sailed, Jamestown's courageous settlers have been overshadowed ever since by the pilgrims of Plymouth. But as historian James Horn demonstrates in this vivid and meticulously researched account, Jamestown-not Plymouth-was the true crucible of American history. Jamestown introduced slavery into English-speaking N...
The chance discovery of the log of a slave ship - the "Daniel and Henry" which set sail from Dartmouth in 1700, bound for the Guinea Coast - prompted Nigel Tattersfield to make this investigation into an episode in England's provincial maritime history. After an Act of Parliament in 1698 released monopoly on trading in West Africa, respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized their chance of quick rewards from human souls. This book provides an insight into the world of these me...