Print And Public Politics In The English Revolution

This book assesses how print culture transformed the political nation, at the level of everyday political practices, habits and thought.

Insolent proceedings brings together leading scholars working on the politics, religion and literature of the English Revolution. It embraces new approaches to the upheavals that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, in daily life as well as in debates between parliamentarians, royalists and radicals. Driven by a determination to explore the dynamic course and consequences of the civil wars and Interregnum, contributors investigate the polemics, print culture and everyday practices of the revolutionary decades, in order to rethink the period’s ‘public politics’. This involves integrating national and local affairs, as well as ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture, and looking at the connections between everyday activism and ideological endeavours. The book also examines participation by – and the treatment of – women from all walks of life.

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

This firmly established essential guide to the literature in the field appears here in a much revised third edition. New chapters are included on twentieth-century historians’ treatments of social complexities, politics, political culture and revisionism, and on the Revolution’s unstoppable reverberations. All the other chapters have been amended and recast to take account of recent publications. The book provides a searching re-examination of why the English Revolution remains such a provocatively controversial subject and analyzes the different ways in which historians over the last three centuries have tried to explain its causes, course and consequences. Clarendon, Hume, Macaulay, Gardiner, Tawney, Hill, and the present-day revisionists are given extended treatment, while discussion of the work of numerous other historians is integrated into a coherent, informative and immensely readable survey.

This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

Examines the experiences of Catholics during the period when England was ruled by Puritan Protestants.

Reveals the dynamics and rise in prominence of Scottish public opinion in a period of religious and constitutional tension.