This book examines the complexities of reformed religion in early-modern England, through an examination of the experiences of Edwin Sandys, a prominent member of the Elizabethan Church hierarchy. Sandys was an ardent evangelical in the Edwardian era forced into exile under Mary I, but on his return to England he became a leader of the Elizabethan Church. He was Bishop of Worcester and London and finally Archbishop of York. His transformation from Edwardian radical to a defender of the Elizabethan status quo illustrated the changing role of the Protestant hierarchy. His fight against Catholicism dominated much of his actions, but his irascible personality also saw him embroiled in numerous conflicts and left him needing to defend his own status.

This new study examines the relationship of atheism to religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in a broad array of literary texts and political and religious controversies written in Latin and the vernacular primarily in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The main authors featured are Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Dirck Coornhert, Justus Lipsius, Gisbertus Voetius, the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus, and Pierre Bayle. These authors reflect and inform changing attitudes to religious tolerance inspired by a complete reconceptualization of atheism over the course of three centuries of literary and intellectual history. By integrating the history of tolerance in the history of atheism, Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist’s Progress should prove stimulating to historians of philosophy as well as literary specialists and students of Reformation history.

This is a coordinated presentation of the economic basis of revolutionary change in 16th- and early-17th century England, addressing a crucial but neglected phase of historical development. It traces a transformation in the agrarian economy and substantiates the decisive scale on which this took place, showing how the new forms of occupation and practice on the land related to seminal changes in the general dynamics of commercial activity. An integrated, self-regulating national market generated new imperatives, particularly a demand for a right of freedom of trade from arbitrary exactions and restraints. This took political force through the special status that rights of consent had acquired in England, based on the rise of sovereign representative law following the Break with Rome. These associations were reflected in a distinctive merchant-gentry alliance, seeking to establish freedom of trade and representative control of public finance, through parliament. This produced a persistent challenge to royal prerogatives such as impositions from 1610 onwards. Parliamentary provision, especially legislation, came to be seen as essential to good government. These ambitions led to the first revolutionary measures of the Long Parliament in early 1641, establishing automatic parliaments and the normative force of freedom of trade.

Protestant Resistance in Counterreformation Austria examines Austrian Protestants who actively resisted the Habsburg Counterreformation in the early seventeenth century. While a determined few decided early on that only military means could combat the growing pressure to conform, many more did not reach that conclusion until they had been forced into exile. Since the climax of their activism coincided with the Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years' War, the study also analyzes contemporary Swedish policy and the resulting Austro-Swedish interrelationship. Thus, a history of state and religion in the early modern Habsburg Monarchy evolves into a prime example of histoire croisée, of historical experiences and traditions that transcend political borders. The book does not only explore the historical conflict itself, however, but also uses it as a case study on societal recollection. Austrian nation-building, which tenuously commenced in the interwar era but was fully implemented after the restoration of Austrian statehood in 1945, was anchored in a conservative ideological tradition with strong sympathies for the Habsburg legacy. This ideological perspective also influenced the assessment of the confessional period. The modern representation of early modern conflicts reveals the selectivity of historical memory.

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

This book shows how the Dutch accumulation of great wealth was closely linked to their involvement in warfare. By charting Dutch activity across the globe, it explores Dutch participation in the international arms trade, and in wars both at home and abroad. In doing so, it ponders the issue of how capitalism has often historically thrived best when its practitioners are ruthless and ignore the human cost of their search for riches. This complicates the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalists as middle-class exploiters in arguing for a much greater agency among lower-class Dutch soldiers and sailors in their efforts to benefit from skills that were in high demand.

This volume uses four case studies, all with strong London connections, to analyze homicide law and the pardoning process in eighteenth-century England. Each reveals evidence of how attempts were made to negotiate a path through the justice system to avoid conviction, and so avoid a sentence of hanging. This approach allows a deep examination of the workings of the justice system using social and cultural history methodologies. The cases explore wider areas of social and cultural history in the period, such as the role of policing agents, attitudes towards sexuality and prostitution, press reporting, and popular conceptions of "honorable" behavior. They also allow an engagement with what has been identified as the gradual erosion of individual agency within the law, and the concomitant rise of the state. Investigating the nature of the pardoning process shows how important it was to have "friends in high places," and also uncovers ways in which the legal system was susceptible to accusations of corruption. Readers will find an illuminating view of eighteenth-century London through a legal lens.

Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763, explores and analyses existing narratives of Jacobitism and Unionism in late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century Scotland. Using in-depth archival research, the book questions the extent to which the currency of kinship patronage politics persisted in Scotland as the competing ideologies of Scottish Jacobitism and British Whiggism grew. It discusses the connection between the manifest corruption of patronage politics and the efflorescence of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also examines the stance taken by David Hume and Adam Smith in defining themselves as philosophers first, Whigs second, but Scots above all else, and analyses whether they achieved international success because of or despite the parliamentary union with England in 1707. Organised chronologically and concluding with an assessment of the newly formed United Kingdom in the decades following the 1707 union, Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763 will be of great interest to researchers and academics of early modern Scotland.

This book explores the influence of classical texts upon early European settlers and inhabitants of the Tidewater region of Virginia, addressing how Greek and Roman literature and culture shaped and sometimes challenged prevailing assumptions about personhood, liberty, town planning, and representative government in Virginia during the period of its expansion from the fort at Jamestown to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia. Ben Haller introduces the reader to the Ovid translation which George Sandys penned during his time in Virginia as Treasurer; William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, likely one inspiration for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; William Byrd II’s writings, including his secret diaries which record the intimate details of the life of an Indian Trader and plantation owner in the early eighteenth century; and Jefferson’s expansive Enlightenment Era appetite for knowledge classical and modern. Haller’s analysis of these texts is carefully anchored in a discussion of the cultural historical context of the English settlement of Virginia, the excavations of Pompeii, the eighteenth-century mania for Palladian architecture, the construction of the campus of the University of Virginia, and new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty and human rights which came to the fore during Jefferson’s lifetime, and which he helped to enshrine in modern American political thought.

In 1718, a young woman named Moricette Nayl fought with her brother’s mother-in-law and accidentally killed her. Ruled a homicide, the incident set in motion an investigation, a trial, Moricette's flight from justice, an execution in effigy and, ultimately, the pardon of the killer and her reintegration into the community. Based on the detailed records of the court dossier, this microhistory reveals the social networks of a small town, the history of interpersonal violence, the complex criminal justice system at work, and the power of restoring harmony after a tragedy of this magnitude. An enduring mystery is the reluctance of those closest to the crime to participate in the legal process. An explanation for their silence sheds light on the turmoil of the criminal justice system in France in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Neither independent feudal lords nor an elite tamed by an Absolutist king, the gentlemen overseeing justice in this place maintained a delicate balance between their personal power and the rule of law. The incident and its aftermath also reveal the bonds that make community possible, even in the face of senseless violence.