The first comprehensive, comparative study of the visual culture of monarchy in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne

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.

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

The idea of improvement - gradual and cumulative betterment - was something new in 17th century England. It became commonplace to assert that improvements in agriculture, industry, commerce, and social welfare would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself new, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement which they took with them to Ireland, Scotland, and America. Slack explains the political, intellectual, and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root.

The second volume of The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism traces the fortunes of Catholic communities in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland across a period of great uncertainty and change. From the outset of the Civil Wars in 1641 to the Jacobite rising of 1745, Catholics in the three kingdoms were varied in their responses to tumultuous events and tantalising opportunities. The competing forces of dynamism and conservatism within these communities saw them constantly seeking to re-situate or re-imagine themselves as their relationship to the state, to Protestantism, to continental Europe, as well as the wider world beyond, changed and evolved. Consciously transnational, the volume moves away from insular conceptualisations of Catholicism and instead stresses connections with the European continent and beyond. Early chapters give broad overviews of the experience of Catholics in the period, tracking key events and important developments from 1641 to 1745. Chapters then address specific aspects of Catholicism, including empire and overseas missions, missionary activity, devotion, spirituality, trade, material culture, music, and architecture, among others, revealing a complex, rich and varied history of Catholicism in the period.

Deposing Monarchs analyses depositions in Northern Europe between 1500 and 1700 as a type of frequent political conflict which allows to present new ideas on early modern state formation, monarchy, and the conventions of royal rulership. The book revises earlier conceptualizations of depositions as isolated, unique events that emerged in the context of national historiographies. An examination of the official legitimations of depositions reveals that in times of crisis, concepts of tradition, rule of law, and political consensus are much more influential than the divine right of kings. Tracing the similarities and differences of depositions in Northern Europe transnationally and diachronically, the book shows monarchical succession as more non-linear than previously presumed. It offers a transferable model of the different elements needed in depositions, such as opposition to the monarch by multiple groups in a realm, the need for a convincing rival candidate, and a legitimation based on political traditions or religious ideas. Furthermore, the book bolsters our understanding of authority and rule as a constant process of negotiation, adding to recent research on political culture, and on the cultural history of politics.

The first book to analyze the interplay of cultural memory, politics and the changing media ecology of early eighteenth-century Britain.

Moments of royal succession, which punctuate the Stuart era (1603-1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions: to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefitting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

William M. Cavert investigates the origins of urban air pollution, explaining how this problem arose during the early modern period.

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, Joseph Hone shows that arguments about Anne's right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen's legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical analysis, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, Literature and Party Politics demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.