"Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex KB PC (11 January 1591? 14 September 1646) was an English Parliamentarian and soldier during the first half of the seventeenth century. With the start of the English Civil War in 1642 he became the first Captain-General and Chief Commander of the Parliamentarian army, also known as the Roundheads. However, he was unable and unwilling to score a decisive blow against the Royalist army of King Charles I. He was eventually overshadowed by the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell and resigned his commission in 1646"--Wikipedia.

Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history--sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events--reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution. The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

There is not, and never was, a monolithic masculinity; there are, and always have been, multiple masculinities. Today diversity with regard to gender and sexuality is beginning to be recognized and celebrated even while many religious denominations still resist these cultural changes. This book offers pastoral interpretations of these social shifts in light of psychological principles, applying them to topics such as the moral disapproval of masturbation; the efforts of some churches to convince homosexual men to adopt a heterosexual orientation; the dynamics of male envy of female longevity; the homosexual tendencies of King James of England and Scotland; and biblical portraits of God's body, gender, and sexuality. The authors make a special use of the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation--that is, the redirection of sexual desires that are considered unacceptable or unworthy toward interests and aspirations that are considered acceptable and worthy. While the use of psychoanalytic hermeneutics here is likely to raise various red flags for potential religious readers (especially for those who have been informed that Sigmund Freud was hostile toward religion), this book presents a rather different Freud by focusing on religious sublimation.

Horses played a major role in the military, economic, social and cultural history of early-modern England. This book uses the supply of horses to parliamentary armies during the English Civil War to make two related points. Firstly it shows how control of resources - although vital to success - is contingent upon a variety of logistical and political considerations. It then demonstrates how competition for resources and construction of individuals’ identities and allegiances fed into each other. Resources, such as horses, did not automatically flow out of areas which were nominally under Parliament’s control. Parliament had to construct administrative systems and make them work. This was not easy when only a minority of the population actively supported either side and property rights had to be negotiated, so the success of these negotiations was never a foregone conclusion. The study also demonstrates how competition for resources and construction of identities fed into each other. It argues that allegiance was not a fixed underlying condition, but was something external and changeable. Actions were more important than thoughts and to secure victory, both sides needed people to do things rather than feel vaguely sympathetic. Furthermore, identities were not always self-fashioned but could be imposed on people against their will, making them liable to disarmament, sequestration, fines or imprisonment. More than simply a book about resources and logistics, this study poses fundamental questions of identity construction, showing how culture and reality influence each other. Through an exploration of Parliament’s interaction with local communities and individuals, it reveals fascinating intersections between military necessity and issues of gender, patriarchy, religion, bureaucracy, nationalism and allegiance.

Queen Elizabeth’s bloody rule over Ireland is examined in this “richly-textured, impressively researched and powerfully involving” history (Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600–1972). England’s violent subjugation of Ireland in the sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth I was one of the most consequential chapters in the long, tumultuous relationship between the two countries. In this engaging and scholarly history, James C. Roy tells the story of revolt, suppression, atrocities, and genocide in the first colonial “failed state”. At the time, Ireland was viewed as a peripheral theater, a haven for Catholic heretics, and a potential “back door” for foreign invasions. Tormented by such fears, lord deputies sent by the queen reacted with an iron hand. These men and their subordinates—including great writers such as Edmund spencer and Walter Raleigh—would gather in salons to pore over the “Irish Question”. But such deliberations were rewarded by no final triumph, only debilitating warfare that stretched across Elizabeth’s long rule.

First published in 2000, this book is a modern and accessible edition of a manuscript journal kept by Thomas Juxon.