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This book explores the Spanish elite’s fixation on social and racial “passing” and “passers” as represented in a wide range of texts produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines literary and non-literary works that express the dominant Spaniards’ anxiety that socially mobile New Christians could impersonate and pass as versions of themselves. Current scholarship has implicitly postulated that the social energy that led to the massive marginalization of New Christians and/or lowborns from central social spaces, and the marginals’ attempts to hide their true identity, had its roots in the elite’s rejection of sociocultural and genealogical heterogeneity, or “difference.” Christina Lee makes a key intervention in this discussion by proposing that there was a parallel phenomenon at play that might have been as resounding as an anxiety roused by the presence of those who were clearly different, a phenomenon she calls “the anxiety of sameness.” Lee argues that while conspicuous religious and socio-cultural difference was certainly perturbing and unsettling, in some ways, it was not as threatening to the dominant Spanish identity as the potential discovery of the arbitrariness that separated them from the undesirables of society. Students and seasoned scholars of Spanish history and literature will not only benefit from Lee’s arguments about the elite’s attempt to deny the fluidity of early modern identity, but also gain from her fresh readings of the works of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Quevedo, as well as her analyses of lesser known works, such as joke books, treatises, genealogical catalogues, and documentary accounts.

This book explores the religious, political and cultural implications of a collision of highly charged polemic prompted by the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662, providing an in-depth study of this heated exchange centring on the departing ministers' farewell sermons. Many of these valedictions, delivered by hundreds of dissenting preachers in the weeks before Bartholomew's Day, would be illegally printed and widely distributed, provoking a furious response from government officials, magistrates and bishops. The book re-interprets the political significance of ostensibly moderate Puritan clergy, arguing that their preaching posed a credible threat to the restored political order.

This is a full-length modern study of the Diggers or ‘True Levellers’, who were among the most remarkable of the radical groups to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640–60. Acting at a time of unparalleled political change and heightened millenarian expectation, the Diggers believed that the establishment of an egalitarian, property-less society was imminent. This book establishes the local origins of the Digger movement and sets out to examine pre-Civil War social relations and social tensions in the parish of Cobham—from where significant numbers of the Diggers came—and the impact of civil war in the local community. The book provides a detailed account of the Surrey Digger settlements and of local reactions to the Diggers, and it explores the spread of Digger activities beyond Surrey. In chapters on the writings and career of Gerrard Winstanley, the book seeks to offer a reinterpretation of one of the major thinkers of the English Revolution.

In the early modern period, Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions were impelled to establish colleges for the education and formation of students in more hospitable Catholic territories. The Irish, English and Scots Colleges founded in France, Flanders, the Iberian peninsula, Rome and elsewhere are the best known, but the phenomenon extended to Dutch and Scandinavian foundations in southern Flanders and the German lands. Similarly colleges were established in Rome for various national communities, among whom the Maronites are a striking example. The first colleges were founded in the mid-sixteenth century and tens of thousands of students passed through them until their closure in late eighteenth century. Only a handful survived the disruption of the French Revolutionary wars to re-emerge in the nineteenth century. Historians have long argued that these exile colleges played a prominent role in maintaining Catholic structures by supplying educated clergy equipped to deal with the challenges of their domestic churches. This has ensured that the Irish, English and Scots colleges in particular have a rich historiography laid out in the pages of Archivium Hibernicum, the Records of the Scots Colleges or the volumes published under the aegis of the Catholic Record Society in England. Until recently, however, their histories were considered in isolating confessional and national frameworks, with surprisingly little attempt to examine commonalities or connections. Recent research has begun to open up the topic by investigating the social, economic, cultural and material histories of the colleges. Meanwhile renewed interest in the history of early modern migration has encouraged historians to place the colleges within the vibrant migrant communities of Irish, English, Scots and others on the continent. The Introduction begins with a survey of the colleges. It assesses their historiographies, paying particular attention to the research of the last three decades. The introduction argues that an obvious next step is to examine the colleges in transnational and comparative perspectives. Finally, it introduces the volume's essays on Irish, English, Scots, Dutch, German and Maronite colleges, which provide up-to-date research by leading historians in the field and point to the possibilities for future research on this exciting topic.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians of England pioneered a series of new approaches to the history of economic policy. Commerce, Finances and Statecraft charts the development of these forms of writing and explores the role they played in the period's economic, political and historiographical thought. Through doing so, the book makes a significant intervention in the study of historiography, and provides an original account of early-modern and Enlightenment history. A broad selection of historical writing is discussed, ranging from the work of Francis Bacon and William Camden in the Jacobean-era, through a series of accounts shaped by the English Civil War and the party-political conflicts that followed it, to the eighteenth-century's major account of British history: David Hume's History of England. Particular attention is paid to the historiographical context in which historians worked and the various ways they copied, adapted and contested one another's narratives. Such an approach enables the study to demonstrate that historical writing was the site of a wide-ranging, politically-charged debate concerning the relationship which existed – and should have existed – between government and commerce at various moments in England’s past.

During the sixteenth-century officials and interested parties in Ireland composed hundreds of papers on crown policy in the country and sent them to the metropolitan government in England. The information contained in these ‘reform’ treatises substantially shaped how senior ministers in England viewed an Ireland which very few of them had visited personally. Moreover these documents informed much of these ministers’ outlooks on the Irish of Ireland and the allegedly backward political and social system operating there. Perhaps most importantly, these treatises argued for the adoption of specific policies to confront various problems perceived in Ireland. Some of these in arguing for ‘reform’ through an aggressive programme of regional conquest and colonization were highly coercive, while others in proposing that ‘reform’ could be achieved through educational and social reform or the expansion of the court system had a more sanguine view of Ireland. Whatever the approach, a great many of these were in due course implemented in Ireland. In time the decision to implement these same policies played a major role in shaping the history of early modern Ireland and indeed the wider British state. As such these treatises are central to how the Tudors governed Ireland. This book offers the first extended treatment of the approximately six-hundred extant ‘reform’ treatises. In doing so it examines not just the content of this large body of papers, but how officials and other parties on the periphery of the Irish government debated policy in sixteenth-century Ireland and what impact their writings had.

This book explores at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, the book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes that are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. Its breadth will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period.

This book examines the nature and significance of religious enthusiasm in early Enlightenment England. In the early modern period, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was a smear word used to discredit the dissenters of the radical Reformation as dangerous religious fanatics. In England, the term gained prominence from the Civil War period and throughout the eighteenth century. Anglican ministers and the proponents of the Enlightenment used it more widely against Paracelsian chemists, experimental philosophers, religious dissenters and divines, astrologers or anyone claiming superior knowledge. As a result, our understanding of enthusiasm is largely influenced by the hostile discourse of Augustan moralist and early Enlighteners. But who exactly were these enthusiasts? What did they believe in, how did they operate as a community and what impact did they have on their contemporaries? This book aims to answer these questions by concentrating on the notorious case of the French Prophets. It demonstrates how the understanding of enthusiasm evolved around 1700, designating anything from a religious fanaticism to a social epidemic and even a bodily disease. It offers the first comprehensive approach to enthusiasm, looking at this multifarious issue from a successively social, religious, cultural, political and medical perspective. Based on extensive archival research, it sheds new light on the reality of enthusiasm away from the hostility of Enlightenment discourse.

Impostors and impostures featured prominently in the political, social and religious life of early modern England. Who was likely to be perceived as impostor, and why? This book offers a full-scale analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon. Using approaches drawn from historical anthropology and micro-history, it investigates changes and continuities within the impostor phenomenon from 1500 to the late eighteenth century, exploring the variety of representations and perceptions of impostors, and their deeper meanings within the specific contexts of social, political, religious, institutional and cultural change. The book examines a wide range of sources, from judicial archives and other official records to chronicles, newspapers, ballads, pamphlets and autobiographical writings. Given that identity is never fixed, but involves a performative dimension, changing over time and space, it looks at the specific factors which constitute identity in a particular context, and asks why certain characteristics of an allegedly false identity were regarded as fake.

This focused collection of essays offers a dynamic new perspective on the evolution of post-reformation religious communities within Britain and Ireland. A wide-ranging comparison of Catholicism and Presbyterianism across the archipelago has not previously been attempted, though telling points of comparison are readily apparent between two communions which aspired to the religious formation of national communities of faith, yet which, periodically or permanently, adapted to the disempowered position of dissident or proscribed faiths. The proposed book, the first volume to be prepared by the “Insular Christianity Network” founded in 2008 through a grant from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, is the fruit of a carefully planned collaboration which assembled many of the most distinguished scholars of Early Modern Religion in Britain and Ireland to engage with a number of pre-selected themes. Current study of Early Modern religious confessions in Ireland and Britain tends to be concentrate on one religious perspective in one particular part of the archipelago. This volume breaks new ground by offering a genuine cross-national comparative perspective on the manner in which two profoundly different and yet in some respects strikingly similar communions formulated aspirations, secured achievements and made adaptations.

This book is a major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial, which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hanged in the village of Pendle in Lancashire. In it, 11 experts from a variety of fields offer surveys of these events and their meanings for contemporaries, for later generations, and for the present day. Chapters look at the politics and ideology of witch-hunting, the conduct of the trial, the social and economic contexts, the religious background, and the local and family details of the episode.

This is a full-length study of one of the most prolific and controversial polemical authors of the seventeenth century. It provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which Laudian and royalist polemical literature was created, tracing continuities and changes in a single corpus of writings from 1621 through to 1662. In the process, the author presents new perspectives on the origins and development of Laudianism and ‘Anglicanism’, and on the tensions within royalist thought. The book is neither a conventional biography nor simply a study of printed works, but instead constructs an integrated account of Peter Heylyn's career and writings in order to provide the key to understanding a profoundly polemical author. Throughout the book, Heylyn's shifting views and fortunes prompt a reassessment of the relative coherence and stability of royalism and Laudianism.

This collection of essays examines the place of ‘saints’ and sanctity in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that holy men and women were pivotal in religious discourse, as subjects of veneration and inter-confessional contention. Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonization had disappeared, they continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Even in an age of confessional strife, doubt and secularisation, devotional practices and language remained central to how both Christians and their opponents reflected on that changing world. Making and remaking saints is significant, then, because until now no-one has explored how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a fruitful metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group. Together they will attract not just historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt.

This study examines how political news was concealed, manipulated and distorted in late Jacobean England. Using a wide range of extraordinarily rich manuscript sources, it analyses how news was managed and interpreted during a period of acute political and religious conflict. It analyses how the flow of information to and from the King was managed by his secretaries of state and diplomats, and how the King prevented information about his policies from leaking in to the wider public sphere. It analyses the ‘outward shows’ James made to signal his intentions and mislead a variety of audiences, as well as they ways in which these ‘performances’ could backfire and undermine royal authority. It also examines the sceptical and often cynical reception of news, and the political significance of the rumours that circulated in court and country. It thereby contributes to a wider range of historical debates that reach across the politics and political culture of the reign and beyond. It advances new arguments about censorship, counsel, and the formation of policy; propaganda and royal image-making; political rumours and the relationship between elite and popular politics, as well as shedding new light on the nature and success of James I's style of rule. In doing so, it aims to examine news as a source of influence and even power in Jacobean England.

This book is a collection of essays that study the diffusion of radical ideas in Britain from the period of the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century to the Romantic Revolution in the early nineteenth century. It explores the modes of articulation and dissemination of radical ideas in the period by focusing on actors (“radical voices”) and a variety of written texts and cultural practices (“radical ways”), ranging from fiction, correspondence, pamphlets and newspapers to petitions presented to Parliament and toasts raised in public. It analyses the way these media interact with their political, religious, social and literary context. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and uses case studies as insights into the global picture of radical ideas.

This book examines the activities of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman, and using the approaches of the history of reading provides a detailed analysis of his mindset. Blundell was neither the passive victim nor the entirely loyal subject that he and others have claimed. He actively defended his family from the penal laws and used the relative freedom that this gave him to patronise other Catholics. In his locality, Blundell ensured that the township of Little Crosby was populated almost entirely by his co-religionists, on a national level he constructed and circulated arguments supporting the removal of the penal laws, and on an international level he worked as an agent for the Poor Clares of Rouen. That he cannot be defined solely by his victimhood is further supported by his commonplace notes. Not only did Blundell rewrite the histories of recent civil conflicts to show that Protestants were prone to rebellion and Catholics to loyalty, but we also find a different perspective on his religious beliefs. His commonplaces suggest an underlying tension with aspects of Catholicism that is manifest throughout his notes on his practical engagement with the world, in which it is clear that he was wrestling with the various aspects of his identity. This examination of Blundell's political and cultural worlds complicates generalisations about early modern religious identities.

This book explores the life, thought and political commitments of the free-thinker John Toland (1670–1722). Studying both his private archive and published works, it illustrates how he moved in both subversive and elite political circles in England and abroad. The book explores the connections between Toland's republican political thought and his irreligious belief about Christian doctrine, the ecclesiastical establishment and divine revelation, arguing that far from being a marginal and insignificant figure, he counted queens, princes and government ministers as his friends and political associates. In particular, Toland's intimate relationship with the Electress Sophia of Hanover saw him act as a court philosopher, but also as a powerful publicist for the Hanoverian succession. The book argues that he shaped the republican tradition after the Glorious Revolution into a practical and politically viable programme, focused not on destroying the monarchy but on reforming public religion and the Church of England. It also examines how Toland used his social intimacy with a wide circle of men and women (ranging from Prince Eugene of Savoy to Robert Harley) to distribute his ideas in private. The book explores the connections between his erudition and print culture, arguing that his intellectual project was aimed at compromising the authority of Christian ‘knowledge’ as much as the political power of the Church. Overall, it illustrates how Toland's ideas and influence impacted upon English political life between the 1690s and the 1720s.

Beginning in Kent in the summer of 1830 before spreading throughout the country, the Swing Riots were the most dramatic and widespread rising of the English rural poor. Seeking an end to their immiseration, the protestors destroyed machines, demanded higher wages and more generous poor relief, and even frequently resorted to incendiarism to enforce their modest demands. But occurring against a backdrop of revolutions in continental Europe and a political crisis, Swing to many represented a genuine challenge to the existing ruling order, provoking a bitter and bloody repression. This book offers a new account of this defining moment in British history. It is shown that the protests were more organised, intensive and politically motivated than has hitherto been thought, representing complex statements about the nature of authority, gender and the politics of rural life.