Covering the period from 1558–1603, The Reign of Elizabeth I looks at all the important aspects of the reign of the last of the Tudor monarchs. The volume gives students the critical tools to enable them to perform to their best ability, drawing together the main issues on each topic and providing an accessible guide to the period. Using extensive sources and historiography, Stephen J. Lee explores: the religious settlement government and foreign policy the economy Elizabeth's relationship with Parliament society and culture. Also including a glossary of key terms and a helpful chronology, this is an essential tool for any student of British history.
Deep conflicts in Restoration England produced a torrent of satirical verse on the policies, manners, and morals of Charles II and his age. Almost every poet—impelled by motives ranging from venality to patriotism—took his turn at satirizing the establishment. These Poems on Affairs of State, as they came to be known, provide an inexhaustible and minute record of the times from every point of view. The first volume of the Yale Edition includes the most important pieces, published and unpublished, dealing with events from the restoration of Charles to the outbreak of the Popist Plot in 1678. It is fully annotated and illustrated from contemporary materials. George deForest Lord, associate professor of English at Yale University and Master of Trumbull College, is general editor of the series as well as editor of this first volume.
Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life is the response, at long last, to Evelyn Waugh’s call, in 1935, for a ’scholarly biography’ to replace Richard Simpson's Edmund Campion (1867). Whereas early accounts of his life focused on the execution of the Jesuit priest, this new biography presents a more balanced assessment, placing equal weight on Campion’s London upbringing among printers and preachers, and on his growing stature as an orator in an Oxford riven with religious divisions. Ireland, chosen by Campion as a haven from religious conflict, is shown, paradoxically, to have determined his life and his death. Gerard Kilroy here draws on newly discovered manuscript sources to reveal Campion as a charismatic and affectionate scholar who was finding fulfilment as priest and teacher in Prague when he was summoned to lead the first Jesuit mission to England. The book argues that the delays in his long journey suggest reluctant acceptance, even before he was told that Dr Nicholas Sander had brought ’holy war’ to Ireland, so that Campion landed in an England that was preparing for papal invasion. The book offers fresh insights into the dramatic search for Campion, the populist nature of the disputations in the Tower, and the legal issues raised by his torture. It was the monarchical republic itself that, in pursuit of the Anjou marriage, made him the beloved ’champion’ of the English Catholic community. Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life presents the most detailed and comprehensive picture to date of an historical figure whose loyalty and courage, in the trial and on the scaffold, swiftly became legendary across Europe.
Two eminent scholars of historiography examine the concept of national identity through the key multi-volume histories of the last two hundred years. Starting with Hume’s History of England (1754–62), they explore the work of British historians whose work had a popular readership and an influence on succeeding generations of British children.
