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The Interregnum Archive
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More Than Just Kidd’s Play
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsTom Wareham examines the role played by a legendary yet ill-fated pirate in the consolidation of England’s early trading empire. -
Cromwell, Charles II and the Naseby: Ship of State
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe fortunes of Oliver Cromwell and Charles II and the regard in which their successive regimes came to be held were mirrored in the fate of one of their mightiest naval vessels, as Patrick Little explains. -
Oliver Cromwell and the Print Culture of the Interregnum
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsHow does one determine which writings influenced Cromwell the most? -
Violence and duelling between exiled courtiers: the case of the Caroline Stuart Court in exile, c. 1649-c. 1660
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsYet, though we can clearly say that the duel was not unique to the exiled Caroline Stuart Court, we must still concede that such acts of violence occurred quite frequently there. This was especially true from 1656-59, when Charles II’s Court was in the Spanish Netherlands, and this tendency to conflict was even remarked upon by contemporary observers. -
Oliver Cromwell : Man of Force
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsThere is no denying the fact that in many instances, Oliver Cromwell was in the right place at the most opportune time and that events often seemed to work in his favor through sheer luck, assuming that he had no hand in them. -
Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, edited by Anthony Fletcher
Posted on September 24, 2012 | No CommentsThese were hardly words which Charles wished to hear from his loyal subjects, and the king's displeasure was widely reported. The mayor's speech was not the only public pronouncement in the city on that day, however, and it may be that Charles' subsequent irritation arose more from knowledge of the other public criticism being voiced by the civic preachers. -
Sir Thomas Cotton’s Consumption of News in 1650s England
Posted on September 7, 2012 | No CommentsIt is the evidence regarding Cotton's consumption of such tracts, and particularly two bookseller's bills from 1659, with which this piece is concerned. -
Protestant Bishops in Restoration England
Posted on September 7, 2012 | No CommentsCensure provoked defence; from the 1570s onwards, the English episcopate had faced various demands for further reform or else its total extirpation. -
Anne Askew and Margaret Fell: Religious Women in Prison And Technologies of the Self
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBoth Anne Askew (1521-1546) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) were imprisoned and wrote significant writings in jail. In prison Askew wrote The First Examination (1546) and The Latter Examination (1547); Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666). The two Protestants’ imprisonment indicates not only their struggle for freedom of their Protestant belief but also the government’s arbitrary exercise of institutional power over non-conforming women. -
An examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsAn examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century. -
Witchcraft, Politics and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsBodenham’s fate was shared by several hundred others in early modern England, all of whom became trapped at a deadly intersection of circumstance. It is still sometimes assumed that ‘villagers were constantly engaged in contending with, or discussing, witches’, and that popular suspicions and grievances translated simply into prosecutions. -
‘The art of dancing, demonstrated by characters and figures’: French and English sources for court and theatre dance, 1700-1750
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of James I and Charles I, England developed its own court entertainment in the masque - many of them devised by the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson in collaboration with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. -
Oh, what a lovely war? War, taxation, and public opinion in England, 1624-29
Posted on July 17, 2012 | No CommentsWhy did Charles I encounter such difficulties in funding his war? One factor was perhaps the financial illiteracy of a political elite which failed to comprehend the cost of warfare in an age of military revolution. -
Civil Wars in Britain, 1640-1646: military revolution on campaign
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsThe wars in Scotland and England between 1640 and 1646 were complex affairs that defy ready categorization. They were also remarkably destructive. The Second Bishops’ War of 1640 caused relatively few casualties because one side, the Scots, soundly defeated the English in a rare and extraordinary example of a decisive battle. The English Civil War of 1642 -1646 that pitted Parliamentarians (and Scots for awhile) against the royalist supporters of King Charles I was far bloodier. -
Incendiary texts: book burning in England, c.1640 – c.1660
Posted on June 8, 2012 | No CommentsThough heretics were no longer incinerated, had Bothumley been convicted of blasphemy before two Justices of the Peace and refused to recant he could have suffered death under the provisions of an ordinance of May 1648. -
Jews and crypto-Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century England
Posted on June 1, 2012 | No CommentsOn 31 October 1655 Menasseh waited outside the door as the Council of State sat in session. Menasseh hoped to present copies of his books to members of the Council and eventually a clerk went out to receive them. Among these books was probably a recently written work arguing the case for Jewish readmission ... -
Ballads, Culture and Performance in England 1640-1660
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis study argues that ballads were a uniquely potent cultural medium. Because ballads were used for popular entertainment, the discourses about contemporary political and religious controversies contained in them pervaded culture more so than messages contained in other kinds of print. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on March 26, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
Literature, war and politics, 1642-1668
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsWhat the two poems could not register (beyond a loaded remark in the Epilogue to the effect that if the play had offended the prince then ‘we’ve now / Three hours done treason here’) was the full extent of the political crisis then unfolding. -
The English Diplomatic Corps, 1649-1660: a comparison Of the diplomats of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and of Charles II
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsOther historians have conducted prosopographical studies of British diplomats, but no one has studied the diplomats during the time of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. -
The politics of art and religion : Absolutism and Catholic iconography in early Stuart England 1603-1649
Posted on December 21, 2011 | No CommentsThe two Stuart kings, James and Charles, brought important change to England. For inspiration to modernize, James I looked outside of England, a strategy more vigorously pursued by his successor Charles I. -
High crimes: the law of treason in late Stuart Britain
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsThis is the first work on treason to concentrate exclusively on the all important years between the Restoration and the Union, when the number of trials for this most serious of all crimes reached new heights and during which time the procedural law of treason underwent significant changes. -
`The counterfeit silly curr`: money, politics and the forging of royalist newspapers in the English civil war
Posted on December 13, 2011 | No CommentsConsidering visual,textual,and contextual evidence, as well as literary style and substantive content,I develop in this article methods for distinguishing rivals of Pragmaticus. -
The contexts and contours of British economic literature, 1660-1760
Posted on December 12, 2011 | No CommentsIn the century after the Restoration of Charles II there was a remarkable outpouring of thinking about economic issues in Britain, of exploring the ways and means to prosperity and plenty. -
Signs and Wonders and the English Civil War
Posted on November 29, 2011 | No CommentsChris Durston records how the monstrous and the supernatural were seized on by political and religious factions in seventeenth century England as signs of judgment. -
Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?
Posted on November 29, 2011 | No CommentsConrad Russell finds that it is easier to understand why sheer frustration may have driven Charles to fight than to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution against him. -
The Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture: Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700
Posted on October 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture:Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700 McKeever, Amanda Jane PhD Thesis, Philosophy, University of Sussex, September 27, (2010) Abstract My thesis seeks to address... -
The bio-medical pursuits of Christopher Wren
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsI suppose that anyone who reads the English language sooner or later crosses the path of Christopher Wren. A meteorologist, an astronomer... -
Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends
Posted on October 15, 2011 | No CommentsMargaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends Rachel Warburton - Lakehead University Session: “English Epistolary Friendships" Paper given at the conference: Friendship In Pre-Modern Europe (1300-1700) This paper analysed Margaret Cavendish’s sociable letters. They...