The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford Handbooks)

The volume is innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events.

Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.

Three Kingdoms, Eamon Darcy 3. Political Thought, Glenn Burgess 5. Religion, John Coffey 6.

Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Literature, Medicine, and Science, Karen Edwards 7. Licensing, censorship, and the book trade, Jason McElligott 8. The Personal Rule of Poets: Civil War letters and diaries and the rhetoric of experience, Helen Wilcox The printing, composition, strategy, and impact of the king s book, Robert Wilcher Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, David Loewenstein Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters, Ariel Hessayon Polemic, Analysis, Allegiance, Joad Raymond The Claims of a Civil Science: Hobbes's Leviathan, James Loxley Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan: Milton s Defences and the Principle of sanior pars, Elizabeth Sauer Davenant and the Drama of the Protectorate, Janet Clare Say first, what causea The Origins of Paradise Lost The Consolation of Natural Philosophy: Out of the spoils won in Battel: The chapters on English political history are kicked off by Richard Cust and Michael Braddick who explore the periods between and and to respectively.

Stressing mobilisation over allegiance, Braddick narrates how King and Parliament, despite attempting to maintain a rhetoric of peace and settlement, grew further apart as the bloody war progressed.

As Cromartie notes, many historians included underestimated King Charles, inadequate as he was, and misunderstood the force of those who put arguments for him, particularly in matters of religion. The result of this was the emergence of what Restoration historians call Cavalier-Anglicanism, the backbone of which being the reactionary and vindictive country gentry who would ensure that the Restoration settlement was ultimately the persecuting and exclusive settlement that Charles II himself wished to avoid.

English politics in the s and the Parliaments of the three kingdoms are covered in two chapters by David L.

These set out a succinct yet solid analysis of how the institutions of Parliament were subject to the play of events over the revolutionary period. This, in some degree, is picked up in J.

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Although not an essay on Charles I himself, Philip Baker takes up the recently contentious subject of the Regicide, exploring late s politics. This may have been true of some lay Covenanters, but it was surely not the case for others, such as Archibald Johnston of Wariston or the presbyterian clerics at the heart of Covenanter propaganda such as Alexander Henderson, George Gillespie and Samuel Rutherford. From their first writings these figures advanced the classic 16th-century Calvinist two-kingdom doctrine found in earlier presbyterians such as Thomas Cartwright and Andrew Melville.

Both Stewart and Spurlock seek to refocus the historiographical gaze away from the Scottish politicians, clergy and soldiers in England to the history of the Covenanter regime in Scotland. In doing this, both set out a manifesto for future study of the political culture of the Scottish revolution, a scholarship that they admit is unhappily underrepresented at present. As political stability in the three kingdoms shattered over the issue of how to find peace with the Stuart kings, the Covenanter regime fractured, leading to the divisive Engagement for Charles I in and an equally hopeless campaign for Charles II in the early s.

The consequences of these divisions in the s were not only the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland but the failure of the Covenanter revolution of itself. Yet, as Drs Stewart and Spurlock point out, the Covenanters set in motion many of the structural and intellectual changes that would affect Scottish society for generations to come.

Unlike the consensus on Scotland, the chapters on Ireland, as Toby Barnard acknowledges in his chapter, show the more divisive character of scholarship on midth-century Irish history. Joseph Cope ably summarises the Irish rising of , giving a helpful analysis of recent work on polemic, history and memory in light of the depositions relating to the Irish insurgency against Protestant settlers.

Cope argues that this evidence points to the Irish insurgents carrying out ethnic targeting of English as opposed to Scottish settlers, a fact that contributed to the already polemic-fuelled horror of the Irish rising in England. On the other hand, Michael O Siochru, who loosely structures his essay thematically around answering the various critics of his monograph Confederate Ireland — 2 , stresses the remarkable ethnic inclusivity of the Confederate position of the mids.

Read together, these two chapters provide a detailed reminder of the ethnic dimension of the British Revolution that has also been explored in the English, Cornish and Welsh context by Mark Stoyle and Lloyd Bowen. Taking a longer view, Toby Barnard argues that Cromwell and the Cromwellian repression of Ireland was both a product and a step in the tragic and unhappy history of Ireland in the 17th century.

The consequences of English ascendancy over its neighbours are analysed by balanced and insightful chapters from Derek Hirst and John Morrill, focusing on the problems that the English republic and its bloody victory over its territorial neighbours unleashed. The edging towards the return of Charles Stuart as King Charles II was a mixed affair, with decisions being made in the chaotic events of late Seditious words against the new king were not uncommon and the vast majority acquiesced as the only viable way of obtaining peace.