Stuart England is an invaluable introduction to the political, religious and social history of seventeenth-century England. It provides a wide-ranging and lively account of core events, drawing on both contemporary sources and the latest interpretations by modern historians. Starting with the legacy of Elizabeth I, and ending with the reign of William III and Mary. Stuart England covers all aspects of the monarchy, high and low politics and the culture of the people. Key topics include: * English society and religion * ideas of monarchy and government * finance and parliament * foreign policy With comprehensive questions and analysis, exercises, diagrams and maps,Stuart England provides an excellent and indispensable guide to English history of the seventeenth century.

This volume examines private libraries and book ownership in seventeenth-century England, with particular focus on how libraries developed over this period and the social impact that they had.

This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.

Studies conformity to the Church of England after the Reformation.

This wide-ranging single-volume collection presents the accounts of Yorkists and Lancastrians, Protestants and Catholics, and Roundheads and Cavaliers side by side to illustrate England's difficult transition from the medieval to the modern.

With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century political pornography. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. In addition to the satires which previous scholars have discussed in this context, Mowry brings to light hitherto unexamined pornographies as well as archival texts that reveal the ways in which the satires helped shape the social policies endured by prostitutes and bawds. Her study includes substantial archival evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Mowry argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. Sex work, partisans repeatedly asserted, inherently disrupted ancestral systems of property transfer and distribution in favour of personal ownership, while the republican belief that all men owned the labour of their body achieved a nightmarish incarnation in the prostitute's understanding that the sexual favours she performed were labour. The prostitute's body thus emerged in the loyalist imagination as the epitome of the democratic body politic. Carefully grounded in original research, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 is a cultural study with broad implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of women's sexuality.