Disaffection And Everyday Life In Interregnum England

How did ordinary English men and women respond to the transformations that accompanied the regicide, the creation of a republic, and the rise of the Cromwellian Protectorate? This book uncovers grassroots responses to the tangible consequences of revolution, delving into everyday practices, social interactions, and power struggles as they intersected with the macro-politics of regime change. Tussles at local alehouses, encounters with excise collectors in the high street, and contests over authority at the marketplace reveal how national politics were felt across the most ordinary of activities. Using a series of case studies from counties, boroughs, and the London metropolis, Boswell argues that factional discourses and shifting power relations complicated social interaction. Localized disaffection was broadcast in newsbooks, pamphlets, and broadsides, shaping political rhetoric that refashioned grassroots grievances to promote royalist desires. By uniting disparate people who were alienated by the policies of interregnum regimes, this literature helped to create the spectre of a unified, royalist commons that materialized in the months leading up to Charles II's Restoration. Such agitation - from disaffected mutters to ritualistic violence against officials - informed the broad political culture that shaped debates over governance during one of the most volatile decades in British history. CAROLINE BOSWELL is Associate Professor in History at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

Explores what happened once the monarchy had been swept away after the civil war and puritans found themselves in power. Examines campaigns to regulate sexual behaviour, reform language, and suppress Christmas traditions, disorderly sports, and popular music. Shows how reformers, despite meeting defiance and evasion, could have a major impact.

This study examines the darker side of England's culture of economic improvement between 1640 and 1720. It is often suggested that England in this period grew strikingly confident of its prospect for unlimited growth. Indeed, merchants, inventors, and others promised to achieve immense profit and abundance. Such flowery promises were then, as now, prone to perversion, however. This volume is concerned with the taming of incipient capitalism - how a society in the past responded when promises of wealth creation went badly wrong. The notion of 'projecting' played a key role in this process. Thriving theatre, literature, and popular culture in the age of Ben Jonson began elaborating on predominantly negative images of entrepreneurs or 'projectors' as people who pursued Crown's and their own profits at the public's expense. This study examines how the ensuing public distrust came to shape the negotiation in the subsequent decades over the nature of embryonic capitalism. The result is a set of fascinating discoveries. By scrutinising greedy 'projectors', the incipient public sphere helped reorient the practices and priorities of entrepreneurs and statesmen away from the most damaging of rent-seeking behaviours. Far from being a recent response to mainstream capitalism, ideas about socially responsible business have long shaped the pursuit of wealth, power, and profit. Taming Capitalism before its Triumph unravels the rich history of broken promises of public service and ensuing public suspicion - a story that throws fresh light on England's 'transition to capitalism', especially the emergence of consumer society and the financial revolution towards the end of the seventeenth century.

The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes collects twenty-six newly commissioned, original chapters on the philosophy of the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Best known today for his important influence on political philosophy, Hobbes was in fact a wide and deep thinker on a diverse range of issues. The chapters included in this Oxford Handbook cover the full range of Hobbes's thought--his philosophy of logic and language; his view of physics and scientific method; his ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law; and his views of religion, history, and literature. Several of the chapters overlap in fruitful ways, so that the reader can see the richness and depth of Hobbes's thought from a variety of perspectives. The contributors are experts on Hobbes from many countries, whose home disciplines include philosophy, political science, history, and literature. A substantial introduction places Hobbes's work, and contemporary scholarship on Hobbes, in a broad context.

The Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum (or Little Book about the Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn) is the most substantial contemporary Latin account of the conquest of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. Seemingly written by a churchman who was in Jerusalem itself when the city was besieged and captured, the Libellus fuses historical narrative and biblical exegesis in an attempt to recount and interpret the loss of the Holy Land, an event that provoked an outpouring of grief throughout western Christendom and sparked the Third Crusade. This book provides an English translation of the Libellus accompanied by a new, comprehensive critical edition of the Latin text and a detailed study in the introduction.