Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the most remarkable, significant and colourful figures in seventeenth-century England. This collection of essays by leading scholars of the period highlights the instrumental role he played in the shaping of the political, literary, and print cultures of the Restoration period. Taking an interdisciplinary approach the volume covers all the major aspects of his career, as well as situating them in their broader historical and literary context. By examining his career in this way the book offers insights that will prove of worth to political, social, religious and cultural historians, as well as those interested in seventeenth-century literary and book history.
Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the most remarkable, significant and colourful figures in seventeenth-century England. Whilst there has been regular, if often cursory, scholarly interest in his activities as Licenser and Stuart apologist, this is the first sustained book-length study of the man for almost a century. L'Estrange's engagement on the Royalist side during the Civil war, and his energetic pamphleteering for the return of the King in the months preceding the Restoration earned him a reputation as one of the most radical royalist apologists. As Licenser for the Press under Charles II, he was charged with preventing the printing and publication of dissenting writings; his additional role as Surveyor of the Press authorised him to search the premises of printers and booksellers on the mere suspicion of such activity. He was also a tireless pamphleteer, journalist, and controversialist in the conformist cause, all of which made him the bête noire of Whigs and non-conformists. This collection of essays by leading scholars of the period highlights the instrumental role L'Estrange played in the shaping of the political, literary, and print cultures of the Restoration period. Taking an interdisciplinary approach the volume covers all the major aspects of his career, as well as situating them in their broader historical and literary context. By examining his career in this way the book offers insights that will prove of worth to political, social, religious and cultural historians, as well as those interested in seventeenth-century literary and book history.
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.
Archives are popularly seen as liminal, obscure spaces -- a perception far removed from the early modern reality. This examination of the central English archival system in the period before 1700 highlights the role played by the public records repositories in furnishing precedents for the constitutional struggle between Crown and Parliament. It traces the deployment of archival research in these controversies by three individuals who were at various points occupied with the keeping of records: Sir Robert Cotton, John Selden, and William Prynne. The book concludes by investigating the secretive State Paper Office, home of the arcana imperii, and its involvement in the government's intelligence network: notably the engagement of its most prominent Keeper Sir Thomas Wilson in judicial and political intrigue on behalf of the Crown.
Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press but dynamic shape-changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision, and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected, and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. Processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation, and posthumous publication resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author's name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book's identity or contents. This collection brings together original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history that explore these various kinds of textual inconstancy and variability. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical, and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy, and of authors including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, John Dryden, Thomas Burnet, John Tillotson, Henry Maundrell, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Wesley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The result is a richly diverse collection that demonstrates the embeddedness of the book trade in the cultural dynamics of early modernity.
This collection includes essays on the literary, theatrical and cultural conditions in Britain during the long eighteenth century, centered on the life, work, and world of the writer/actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821).
