This completely new edition of the works of George Savile (1633-1695) allows a major reassessment of the notorious "trimmer" whose opposition to the Exclusion Bill probably saved the English throne. Of particular interest is Savile's literary output, which is broader and more reflective than the political propaganda for which he is better known. The editor has brought together all of the available texts by this prominent politician and writer, providing detailed introductions to each work and to Halifax's career in general, as well as a commentary that identifies and explains the numerous allusions. This is the first edition to make use of all sixty-one available manuscripts. Seventeen of the thirty works in this volume are being published for the first time.

"This book is intended for historians of the seventeenth century, students of literature." --

"This book is intended for historians of the seventeenth century, students of literature." --

Major intellectual and cultural history of intolerance and toleration in early modern Enlightenment Europe.

Challenging the longstanding interpretation of the early English public sphere as polite, inclusive, and egalitarian this book re-interprets key texts by representative male authors from the period—Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, and Richardson—as reactionary responses to the widely-consumed and surprisingly subversive work of women writers such as Mary Astell, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, whose political and journalistic texts have up until now received little scholarly consideration. By analyzing a wide range of materials produced between the 1690s to the 1750s, Pollock exposes a literary marketplace characterized less by cool rational discourse and genial consensus than by vehement contestation and struggles for cultural authority, particularly in debates concerning the proper extent of women’s participation in English public life. Utilizing innovative methods of research and analysis the book reveals that even at its moment of inception, there was an immanent critique of the early liberal public sphere being articulated by women writers who were keenly aware of the hierarchies and techniques of exclusion that contradicted their culture’s oft-repeated appeals to the principles of equality and universality.

In this path-breaking study, first published in 2000, Jonathan Scott argues that seventeenth-century English history was shaped by three processes. The first was destructive: that experience of political instability which contemporaries called 'our troubles'. The second was creative: its spectacular intellectual consequence in the English revolution. The third was reconstructive: the long restoration voyage toward safe haven from these terrifying storms. Driving the troubles were fears and passions animated by European religious and political developments. The result registered the impact upon fragile institutions of powerful beliefs. One feature of this analysis is its relationship of the history of events to that of ideas. Another is its consideration of these processes across the century as a whole. The most important is its restoration of this extraordinary English experience to its European context.

The book charts the establishment of the modern idea of parliamentary sovereignty.