Product Description: The causes and nature of the civil wars that gripped the British Isles in the mid-seventeenth century remain one of the most studied yet least understood historical conundrums. Religion, politics, economics and affairs local, national and international, all collided to fuel a conflict that has posed difficult questions both for contemporaries and later historians...read more

Product Description: This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines three centuries of radical political activity and thought in England in an attempt to identify and isolate "radical traditions." Written by a distinguished group of international experts, these essays explore and reflect upon the concept of radicalism in political thought and action within a theoretical context...read more

Product Description: The collective, integrated work of fourteen distinguished historians, this book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. European thinkers of the period may seem to have inherited a common vocabulary and a set of concepts, yet their concerns and their expression of those concerns were conditioned by the particular contexts in which they formulated and refined their ideas...read more

Product Description: Through twelve probing essays from leading scholars in the field, this book analyzes the consequences of the accession of James I in 1603 for English and British history, politics, literature and culture. Questioning the extent to which 1603 marked a radical break with the past, the book explores the Scottish and Welsh--as well as the wider European and colonial--contexts to this crucial date in history...read more

Product Description: For nearly two decades, Renaissance literary scholarship has been dominated by various forms of postmodern criticism which claim to expose the simplistic methodology of `traditional' criticism and to offer a more sophisticated view of the relation between literature and history; however, this new approach, although making scholars more alert to the political significance of literary texts, has been widely criticised on both methodological and theoretical grounds...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first book to offer both a full understanding of the importance of "British" history, while also providing the tools that allow a critical assessment of its achievements. The New British History introduces the new perspectives opened up by the adoption of a truly British approach to historiography--one that encompasses on equal terms the interacting histories of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England--from the time of Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s to the Act of Union in 1707...read more

Product Description: In this reinterpretation of the early Stuart period in England, Glenn Burgess contends that the common understanding of 17th-century English politics is oversimplified and inaccurate. The long-accepted standard view holds that gradual polarization between the Court and Parliament during the reigns of James I and Charles I reflected the split between absolutists - who upheld the divine right of monarchy to rule - and constitutionalists - who resisted tyranny by insisting the monarch was subject to law - and resulted inevitably in civil war...read more

Product Description: The events of the years 1600-1642 have been argued over intensively by historians. Central to these arguments has been a search for the causes of the English Revolution. Many recent historians have denied that the Revolution had any long-term causes, and they have begun to see the period before 1642 in its own terms...read more