A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. In this exhaustively researched new book, two leading scholars of the era, Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, uncover the untold story of how a secret history of courtly poisoning shaped and reflected the political conflicts that would eventually plunge the British Isles into civil war and revolution. Illuminating many hitherto obscure aspects of early modern political culture, this eagerly anticipated work is both a fascinating story of political intrigue and a major exploration of the forces that destroyed the Stuart monarchy.

This well-known book reasserts the central importance of political and religious ideology in the origins of the English Civil War. Recent historiography has concentrated on its social and economic causes: Sommerville reminds us what the people of the time thought they were fighting about. Examining the main political theories in c.17th England - the Divine Right of Kings, government by consent, and the ancient constitution - he considers their impact on actual events. He draws on major political thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, but also on lesser but more representative figures, to explore what was new in these ideas and what was merely the common currency of the age. This major new edition incorporates all the latest thinking on the subject.

This is the first modern study of the production and circulation of manuscripts during the English Renaissance. H.R. Woudhuysen examines the relationship between manuscript and print, looks at people who lived by their pens, and surveys authorial and scribal manuscripts, paying particular attention to the copying of verse, plays, and scholarly works by hand. It investigates the professional production of manuscripts for sale by scribes such as Ralph Crane and Richard Robinson. The second part of the book examines Sir Philip Sydney's works in the context of Woudhuysen's research, discussing all Sidney's important manuscripts, and seeking to assess his part in the circulation of his works and his role in the promotion of a scribal culture. A detailed examination of the manuscripts and early prints of his poems, his Arcadias, and of Astrophil and Stella shed new light on their composition, evolution, and dissemination, as well as on Sidney's friends and admirers.