The gentlewoman's remembrance
The gentlewoman's remembrance

Author: Isaac Stephens

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1526100916

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A microhistory of a never-married English gentlewoman named Elizabeth Isham, this book centres on an extremely rare piece of women's writing - a recently discovered 60,000-word spiritual autobiography held in Princeton's manuscript collections that she penned around 1639. The autobiography is unmatched in providing an inside view of her family relations, her religious beliefs, her reading habits and, most sensationally, the reasons why she chose never to marry despite desires to the contrary held by her male kin, particularly Sir John Isham, her father. Based on the autobiography, combined with extensive research of the Isham family papers now housed at the county record office in Northampton, this book restores our historical memory of Elizabeth and her female relations, expanding our understanding and knowledge about patriarchy, piety and singlehood in early modern England.

Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727
Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727

Author: Edward Vallance

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-05-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1526117916

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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 attacks on the credibility of loyal addresses lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a ‘political public’ but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy. They constituted a political form perfectly suited to a fundamentally unequal society in which political life continued to be centered on the monarchy.

Freedom of speech, 1500–1850
Freedom of speech, 1500–1850

Author: Robert G. Ingram

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-04-27

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1526147092

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This collection brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars to provide historical perspectives on the modern debate over freedom of speech, particularly the question of whether limitations might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech. It integrates religion into the history of free speech and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. Overall, the book argues that while the period from 1500 to 1850 witnessed considerable change in terms of both ideas and practices, these were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates.

London presbyterians and the British revolutions, 1638–64
London presbyterians and the British revolutions, 1638–64

Author: Elliot Vernon

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1526157799

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This is the first book-length exploration of presbyterians and presbyterianism in London during the crisis period of the mid-seventeenth century. It charts the emergence of a movement of clergy and laity that aimed at ‘reforming the Reformation’ by instituting presbyterianism in London’s parishes and ultimately the Church of England. The book analyses the movement’s political narrative and its relationship with its patrons in the parliamentarian aristocracy and gentry. It also considers the political and social institutions of London life and examines the presbyterians’ opponents within the parliamentarian camp. Finally, it focuses on the intellectual influence of presbyterian ideas on the political thought and polity of the Church and the emergence of dissent at the Restoration.

Insolent proceedings
Insolent proceedings

Author: Peter Lake

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 152616499X

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Insolent proceedings brings together leading scholars working on the politics, religion and literature of the English Revolution. It embraces new approaches to the upheavals that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, in daily life as well as in debates between parliamentarians, royalists and radicals. Driven by a determination to explore the dynamic course and consequences of the civil wars and Interregnum, contributors investigate the polemics, print culture and everyday practices of the revolutionary decades, in order to rethink the period’s ‘public politics’. This involves integrating national and local affairs, as well as ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture, and looking at the connections between everyday activism and ideological endeavours. The book also examines participation by – and the treatment of – women from all walks of life.

Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635–66
Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635–66

Author: Elliot Vernon

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1526105918

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This volume looks at how mid-seventeenth-century debates on the government and order of the Church related to the political crisis of the time. It explores debates concerning the relationship between church, state and people, the nature of the various post-Reformation settlements in the British Atlantic and how they impacted on each other, as well as central and local responses to ecclesiastical upheaval. This is one of the first scholarly collections to focus on the topic of church polity and its relation to politics during a critical period of transatlantic history. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the British revolutions as well as those working on the history of the Church and early dissenting tradition.

Lollards in the English Reformation
Lollards in the English Reformation

Author: Susan Royal

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1526128829

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This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants’ ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe’s text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

Connecting centre and locality
Connecting centre and locality

Author: Chris R. Kyle

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-03-26

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1526147149

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This collection explores the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century Britain, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, politics in the localities and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The goal is to create a dialogue between two prominent strands in recent historiography and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. Chapters by leading historians of Stuart England examine how the state worked to communicate with its people and how local communities, often far from the metropole, opened their own lines of communication with the centre.

Revolution remembered
Revolution remembered

Author: Edward Legon

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-03-11

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 152612467X

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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 more than a manifestation of discontent or radicalism – they also provided a way of countering experiences of defeat. Besides speech and writing, parliamentarian and republican views are shown to have manifested as misbehaviour during official commemorations of the civil wars and republic. The book also considers how such views were passed on from the generation of men and women who experienced civil war and revolution to their children and grandchildren.

The pastor in print
The pastor in print

Author: Amy G. Tan

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1526152193

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The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.