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At a time of crisis and constitutional turmoil, literature itself acquired new functions and played a dynamic part in the fragmentation of religious and political authority.
Offering an analysis of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women circumvented a number of interdictions against female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England, this book is primarily a study of female agency. Despite the fact that pamphlets, or cheap unbound books, have recently been located among the most inclusive or democratic aspects of the social life of early modern England, this study provides a more gender-sensitive picture. Marcus Nevitt argues instead that throughout the revolutionary decades pamphlet culture was actually constructed around the public silence and exclusion of women. In support of his thesis, he discusses more familiar seventeenth-century authors such as John Milton, John Selden and Thomas Edwards in relation to the less canonical but equally forceful writings of Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, Mary Pope, 'Parliament Joan' and a large number of Quaker women. This is the first sustained study of the relationship between female agency and cheap print throughout the revolutionary decades 1640 to 1660. It adds to the study of gender in the field of the English Revolution by engaging with recent work in the history of the book, stressing the materiality of texts and the means and physical processes by which women's writing emerged through the printing press and networks of publication and dissemination. It will stimulate welcome debate about the nature and limits of discursive freedom in the early modern period, and for women in particular.
The period from 1640 to 1660, which includes the Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, and the reign of a republican government, is one of the most controversial and dramatic in British history. This book offers an authoritative analysis of the debate among contemporary historians on the causes, significance, and consequences of the events of that era. Aylmer argues that there was at least a partial middle-class revolution, as well as a rebellion with both aristocratic and popular elements.
Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical departure from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. In the process, a strikingly wide variety of contemporary sources comes under scrutiny, including letters, diaries, plays, treatises, translations and poetry. The extent to which the richness and disparateness of these modes of writing militates against or constructs a recognisable 'rhetoric' of exile is one of the book's overriding themes. Also under consideration is the degree to which exilic writing in this period is intended for public consumption, a product of private reflection, or characterised by a coalescence of the two. Importantly, this volume extends the chronological range of the English Revolution beyond 1660 by demonstrating that exile during the Restoration formed a meaningful continuum with displacement during the civil wars of the mid-century. This in-depth and overdue study of prominent and hitherto obscure exiles, conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance yet inextricably bound by the shared experience of displacement, will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines.
Politics, Religion and Society in Revolutionary England 1640-1660 goes beneath the surface of English society in the turbulent years of civil war and interregnum. The authors draw upon a fascinating array of contemporary writings to provide revealing insights into the motivation of those who shaped English history in these crucial years. All the important legislation is included, but also details from personal memoirs, letters and diaries, not to mention the work of radical pamphleteers in the 1640's and 1650's. The authors address the issues which remain unresolved today - the resort to arms and the objectives of the protoganists; the divisions within parliamentary factions and in the army, the emergence of revolutionary religious and political ideas, the trial and execution of Charles I, the consolidation of a new system of government in the Commonwealth and the subsequent establishment of Cromwell's Protectorate, relations between England and Europe are this period, and the demise of the republican experiment with the restoration of monarchy after Cromwell's death. Specimen questions on each set of documents make this volume particulary useful for students of this period, but in reality the authors have produced a work which will stimulate specialist and non-specialist readers alike. This book will cause renewed reflection on the nature of the historical events of the English Revolution.
An undergraduate textbook covering the key events and explanations of the English Civil War, 1640 to 1660. "
Uncloistered Virtue studies the relationship between literature and the political crises of the English Civil War. It explores the ways in which the literary culture of the period changed and survived in radically shifting circumstances and conditions of sometimes extreme adversity, and examines the ways in which old forms developed and new forms emerged to articulate new ideologies and to respond to triumphs and disasters. Included in the book's discussion of a very wide range of authors and texts are examinations of the Cavalier love poetry of Herrick and Lovelace, Herrick's religious verse, the polemical strategies of Eikon Basilike, and the complexities of Cowley's political verse. The author also provides an important new account of Marvell's political instability, while the prose of Lilburne, Winstanley, and the Ranters is the subject of a long and sustained account which focuses on their sometimes exhilarating attempts to find an idiom for ideologies which previously had been unexpressed in English political life.
