Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718 is a reconstruction of the way Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was read and used by English political and religious writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Engaging with the reception of all of Grotius's key works and a wide range of topics, the volume has much to say about the search for peace in an age of religious conflict and about the cultural roots of the Enlightenment. Most of all, Marco Barducci aims to deepen our understanding of the connections that made English political thought part of the history of European thought. To this end, it brings together a succinct account of Grotius's own thinking on key topics, mapping these accounts within English debates, to show why his ideas were seen to be relevant at key moments; shows awareness of the possibilities for the misappropriation inherent in reception; and adds something new to our understanding of why seventeenth-century Englishmen argued in the ways that they did.

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This Companion Volume to Volume V: 1645-1714: The Later Seventeenth Century presents a series of complementary readings of texts and events of the period. J. M. Ezell removes the traditional literary period labels and boundaries used in earlier studies to categorize the literary culture of late seventeenth-century England. She invites readers to explore the continuities and the literary innovations occurring during six turbulent decades, as English readers and writers lived through unprecedented events including a King tried and executed by Parliament and another exiled, the creation of the national entity 'Great Britain', and an expanding English awareness of the New World as well as encounters with the cultures of Asia and the subcontinent. The period saw the establishment of new concepts of authorship and it saw a dramatic increase of women working as professional, commercial writers. London theatres closed by law in 1642 reopened with new forms of entertainments from musical theatrical spectaculars to contemporary comedies of manners with celebrity actors and actresses. Emerging literary forms such as epistolary fictions and topical essays were circulated and promoted by new media including newspapers, periodical publications, and advertising and laws were changing governing censorship and taking the initial steps in the development of copyright. It was a period which produced some of the most profound and influential literary expressions of religious faith from John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, while simultaneously giving rise to a culture of libertinism and savage polemical satire, as well as fostering the new dispassionate discourses of experimental sciences and the conventions of popular romance.

The Companion to Historiography is an original analysis of the moods and trends in historical writing throughout its phases of development and explores the assumptions and procedures that have formed the creation of historical perspectives. Contributed by a distinguished panel of academics, each essay conveys in direct, jargon-free language a genuinely international, wide-angled view of the ideas, traditions and institutions that lie behind the contemporary urgency of world history.