Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

This study of the character and policies of Charles I provides an analysis of the political crisis leading to his personal rule in England during the years before the civil wars. It fills a gap in the historical literature of the period by integrating ideological with political developments and English with international affairs. It is also a contribution to the wider European history of a critical phase of the Thirty Years War. The book offers a new way of understanding Charles by demonstrating how ill-suited his personality was to the workings of the political world. It also argues that Charles's innovatory rule created a new pattern of national politics deeply destructive in its effects. The book gives a gripping account of the king's willingness to pervert the due process of law in dealing with his political opponents, as well as investigating his failures in religious and foreign policy.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw significant numbers of the middle classes imprisoned for debt, with many motivated by a fear of financial failure rather than a desire for upward social mobility. This study examines the role that debt insecurity played within society, and the fragility of the credit relations that underpinned it.

This book is a major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern and early Enlightenment Europe. John Marshall studies late seventeenth-century practices of religious intolerance and toleration in Europe and the arguments that John Locke made in defence of 'universal religious toleration'.

How was the law used to control sex in Tudor England? What were the differences between secular and religious practice? This major study, based on a wide range of church and secular court archives, explores sexual regulation in London and provincial England before, during and immediately after the Reformation.

Pre-Civil War English political culture was shaped by an extensive pamphlet literature, which has remained unknown due to its handwritten form. Drawing from book history and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone reconstructs the world of manuscript pamphleteering to explain how contemporaries came to see their world as political.

London was the early modern world's most polluted city, and its dependence on coal had profound consequences for public health, the environment, and ultimately politics and culture. William M. Cavert presents a detailed study of how inhabitants and travelers accommodated themselves to London's smoky air.

For readers interested in early modern England and the Reformation, this book sheds new light on radical Protestant views of reform and godly identity. It significantly revises our understanding of central episodes and issues in the English Reformation, the nature of early English Protestantism and the development of Puritanism.

Examining the reception of Socinian ideas in England and their role in Royalist and Parliamentarian debates, this book provides a significant rereading of political and ecclesiastical developments during the English Revolution. It demonstrates the interplay between theological ideas and political events and the strong intellectual connections between England and Europe.

Exploring 'honour politics' in the early modern period, Brendan Kane reveals that honour played a powerful role in determining the character of Anglo-Irish society, politics and cultural contact, and brings a cultural perspective to our understanding of English imperialism in Ireland and of the Irish responses to it.

This groundbreaking study examines the careers and political thinking of Elizabethan martial men, whose ambitions were thwarted by a quietist foreign policy. The book also considers its consequences for military rule in Ireland, and presents a lively and sophisticated reinterpretation of this complex, controversial subject.

Oaths were the medium through which the Henrician regime implemented its ideology and secured loyalty among the people and the tool by which the English people embraced, resisted and manipulated royal policy. By considering the central importance of oaths, Jonathan Michael Gray offers new insights into the English Reformation.

An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the politics of religion in later Stuart England and its global empire. William J. Bulman provides a novel account of how the onset of globalization and the end of Europe's religious wars transformed English intellectual, religious and political life.

Long regarded as inept, pedantic, and whimsical, King James VI and I, king of Scotland and England is shown here as an astute and far-sighted statesman who achieved a permanent union between his two kingdoms and a stable European community.

This innovative book explores how tensions in church-state relations created by Henry VIII's Reformation continued to influence relationships between the crown, Parliament and common law during the Restoration and how the institutional, legal and ideological framework of supremacy perpetuated the language of godly kingship after 1660.

Drawing on a wide range of significant but understudied source materials, Andrew Cambers seeks to advance our understanding of Puritan or 'godly' culture in the long seventeenth century. Moving beyond existing interpretations, the author opens up fresh discussions and debates about the nature of early modern reading and religion.

This book shows how liberal education transformed the political and religious culture of early modern Britain. Rather than pursue vainglorious warfare, humanists taught monarchs, including Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James VI, and Charles I, to wield their pens like swords to extend their imperial authority over church and state.

Jason Peacey's study reassesses the communications revolution of the seventeenth century, demonstrating how new media - from ballads to pamphlets and newspapers - transformed the public's ability to understand and take part in national political life. This ultimately involved experience-led attempts to rethink the nature of representation and accountability.

John Foxe's Acts and Monuments - popularly known as the 'Book of Martyrs' - is a milestone in the history of the English book. Based on little-used manuscript sources, this unique study explores the production of this seminal product of the English Reformation.

Throughout Christian history, the sermon has been a key means of transmitting religious ideas. This book was the first to assess the effectiveness of the sermon as a means of spreading Protestant ideas in early modern England by focusing on how sermons were interpreted by their audience.

In late seventeenth-century England, female writers from diverse religious and political traditions confronted the question of women's subordination. Examining this formative period in the debate over sexual difference, Sarah Apetrei argues that far from being a constraining influence on feminism, religion stimulated new thinking about the status of women.

This is a study of the religious culture of sixteenth-century England, centred around preaching, and is concerned with competing forms of evangelism between humanists of the Roman Catholic Church and emerging forms of Protestantism. It is about 'God's Word' and sixteenth-century spirituality, and explores shifts in political power towards Protestantism.

London and the Restoration integrates the history of the kingdom with that of its premier locality in the era of Dryden and Locke.

From the 1650s, the Quaker movement was unusually prolific in its use of the printing press. This book explores the early Quaker leaders' use of printed tracts, how they were produced, distributed and read, and how they were used as part of a dynamic campaign for religious and political liberty.

This 2003 study challenges traditional views of married life in eighteenth-century England. It presents a new picture of power in marriage and the household, and shows also that ideas about adultery and domestic violence evolved during this period, influenced by profound shifts in cultural attitudes about sexuality and violence.

'... a remarkable book ... the force of [Dr Maltby's] argument is inescapable. No historian of the Reformation, of the rise of Anglicanism, or of popular religion in the localities, can afford to neglect her work.' John Guy,The Church Times

This book, first published in 2006, is a revisionist account of the monarchy during the reigns of the first two Hanoverian kings of Britain, George I and George II. Hannah Smith engages with key debates over the nature of early eighteenth-century British society by evaluating the political and social function of the early Georgian court.

This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the seventeenth century's most notorious and sensational court scandal - the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The book examines the production and circulation of news about the scandal and assesses the political significance of contemporary depictions of the affair.

This book was the first full account of one of the most famous debates of the seventeenth century, that between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, John Bramhall. This will interest scholars of early modern British history, religious history and the history of ideas.

A groundbreaking study of the familial networks and the political, religious and mental worlds of the Catholic aristocracy from 1550 to 1640. It demonstrates the extent to which sections of the Catholic community had come to an understanding with both the local and national State by the later 1620s and 1630s.

This wide-ranging and accessible study re-interprets English history and national identity in the century after the civil war. Tony Claydon analyses in depth the English sense of belonging to and active participation in a continental protestant reformation and an international Christendom.