Winner of the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize Musical repertory of great importance and quality was performed on viols in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This is reported by Thomas Mace (1676) who says that ’Your Best Provision’ for playing such music is a chest of old English viols, and he names five early English viol makers than which ’there are no Better in the World’. Enlightened scholars and performers (both professional and amateur) who aim to understand and play this music require reliable historical information and need suitable viols, but so little is known about the instruments and their makers that we cannot specify appropriate instruments with much precision. Our ignorance cannot be remedied exclusively by the scrutiny or use of surviving antique viols because they are extremely rare, they are not accessible to performers and the information they embody is crucially compromised by degradation and alteration. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence including the surviving instruments, music composed for those instruments, and the documentary evidence surrounding the trade of instrument making, Fleming and Bryan draw significant conclusions about the changing nature and varieties of viol in early modern England.

Royalist Identities shifts the emphasis from the question 'What is Royalism?' to 'What did Royalism want to be?' The texts analyzed show how Royalism was concerned with the construction of a set of binary roles and behavioural models designed to perpetuate a certain paradigm of social stability. de Groot deploys theories of identity to analyze the literature and culture of this important period- including the works of Milton, Marvell, Herrick and Cowley, amongst others - and in particular to discuss the formation and construction of an ideologically inflected cultural and social identity.