This book investigates a puzzling and neglected phenomenon - the rise of English Arminianism during the decade of puritan rule. Throughout the 1650s, numerous publications, from scholarly folios to popular pamphlets, attacked the doctrinal commitments of Reformed Orthodoxy. This anti-Calvinist onslaught came from different directions: episcopalian royalists (Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, Peter Heylyn), radical puritan defenders of the regicide (John Goodwin and John Milton), and sectarian Quakers and General Baptists. Unprecedented rejection of Calvinist soteriology was often coupled with increased engagement with Catholic, Lutheran and Remonstrant alternatives. As a result, sophisticated Arminian publications emerged on a scale that far exceeded the Laudian era. Cromwellian England therefore witnessed an episode of religious debate that significantly altered the doctrinal consensus of the Church of England for the remainder of the seventeenth century. The book will appeal to historians interested in the contested nature of 'Anglicanism' and theologians interested in Protestant debates regarding sovereignty and free will. Part One is a work of religious history, which charts the rise of English Arminianism across different ecclesial camps - episcopal, puritan and sectarian. These chapters not only introduce the main protagonists but also highlight a surprising range of distinctly English Arminian formulations. Part Two is a work of historical theology, which traces the detailed doctrinal formulations of two prominent divines - the puritan John Goodwin and the episcopalian Henry Hammond. Their Arminian theologies are set in the context of the Western theological tradition and the soteriological debates, that followed the Synod of Dort. The book therefore integrates historical and theological enquiry to offer a new perspective on the crisis of 'Calvinism' in post-Reformation England.

This study locates the philosophical origins of the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition in the philosophical, theological, and political controversies in seventeenth-century England. By examining the quarrel it identifies the source of modern liberal, republican and conservative ideas about natural rights and government in the seminal works of the Exclusion Whigs Locke, Sidney, and Tyrrell and their philosophical forebears Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pufendorf. This study illuminates how these first Whigs and their diverse eighteenth-century intellectual heirs such as Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Hume, Blackstone, Otis, Jefferson, Burke, and Paine contributed to the formation of Anglo-American political and constitutional theory in the crucial period from the Glorious Revolution through to the American Revolution and the creation of a distinctly American understanding of rights and government in the first state constitutions.

The survey resumes the comparative history with an analysis of provincial rebellions in Early Modern Europe. It concludes with an extended treatment of the epoch's four major revolutionary civil wars. (Vol. 1 covered Society, States, and Early Modern Revolutions: Agrarian and Urban Rebellions)

This is a guide to the vast amount of literature on the history of political thought which has appeared in English since 1945. The editors provide an annotation of the content of many entries and, where appropriate, indicate their significance, controversial nature and readability.

Harold Berman’s masterwork narrates the interaction of evolution and revolution in the development of Western law. This new volume explores two successive transformations of the Western legal tradition under the impact of the sixteenth-century German Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution, with particular emphasis on Lutheran and Calvinist influences. Berman examines the far-reaching consequences of these apocalyptic political and social upheavals on the systems of legal philosophy, legal science, criminal law, civil and economic law, and social law in Germany and England and throughout Europe as a whole. Berman challenges both conventional approaches to legal history, which have neglected the religious foundations of Western legal systems, and standard social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the communitarian dimensions of early modern economic law, including corporation law and social welfare. Clearly written and cogently argued, this long-awaited, magisterial work is a major contribution to an understanding of the relationship of law to Western belief systems.

To Follow The Lambe Wheresoever He Goeth explores church doctrine among English Calvinistic Baptists between 1640 and 1660. It examines the emergence of Calvinistic Baptists against the background of the demise of the Episcopal Church of England, the establishment by Act of Parliament of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and the attempted foundation of a Presbyterian Church of England. Ecclesiology was one of the most important doctrines under consideration in this phase of English history and this book is a contribution to understanding alternative forms of ecclesiology outside the mainstream National Church settlement. It argues that the development of Calvinistic Baptist ecclesiology was a natural development of one stream of Puritantheology, the tradition associated with Robert Brown, and the English separatist movement. This tradition was refined and made experimental in the work of Henry Jacob, who founded a congregation in London in 1616 from which Calvinistic Baptists emerged. Central to Jacob's ideology was the belief that a rightly ordered church acknowledged Christ as King over his people. The Christological priority of early Calvinistic Baptist ecclesiology will constitute the primary contribution of this studyto the investigation of dissenting theology in the period.

A term with myriad associations, revolution is commonly understood in its intellectual, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. Until now, almost no attention has been paid to revolution and questions of geography. Geography and Revolution examines the ways that place and space matter in a variety of revolutionary situations. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers assemble a set of essays that are themselves revolutionary in uncovering not only the geography of revolutions but the role of geography in revolutions. Here, scientific revolutions—Copernican, Newtonian, and Darwinian—ordinarily thought of as placeless, are revealed to be rooted in specific sites and spaces. Technical revolutions—the advent of print, time-keeping, and photography—emerge as inventions that transformed the world's order without homogenizing it. Political revolutions—in France, England, Germany, and the United States—are notable for their debates on the nature of political institutions and national identity. Gathering insight from geographers, historians, and historians of science, Geography and Revolution is an invitation to take the where as seriously as the who and the when in examining the nature, shape, and location of revolutions.

John Owen (1616-1683) and Richard Baxter (1615-1691) were both pivotal figures in shaping the nonconformist landscape of Restoration England. Yet despite having much in common, they found themselves taking opposite sides in several important debates, and their relationship was marked by acute strain and mutual dislike. By comparing and contrasting the parallel careers of these two men, this book not only distils the essence of their differing theology, it also offers a broader understanding of the formation of English nonconformity. Placing these two figures in the context of earlier events, experience and differences, it argues that Restoration nonconformity was hampered by their strained personal relationship, which had its roots in their contrasting experiences of the English Civil War. This study thus contributes to historiography that explores the continuities across seventeenth-century England, rather than seeing a divide at 1660. It illustrates the way in which personality and experience shaped the development of wider movements.