A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration

by Edited by Alan Houston , Steve Pincus

• ISBN13: 9780521802529
• ISBN10: 0521802520
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Originally published in 2001, A Nation Transformed is a major collection of essays by a mix of young and eminent scholars of early modern English history, literature, and political thought. The fruit of an intense interdisciplinary two-day conference held at the Huntington Library, California, it asks whether and in what ways the culture and politics of early modern England was transformed by the second half of the seventeenth century. In sharp contrast to those who have emphasised continuity and the persistence of the ancien règime, the contributors argue that England in 1700 was profoundly different from what it had been in 1640. Essays in the volume deal with changes in natural philosophy, literature, religion, politics, political thought, and political economy. The insights offered here, based on innovative research, will interest scholars and students of early modern history, Renaissance and Augustan literature, and historians of political thought.

Table of Contents

Notes on the contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction. Modernity and later-seventeenth-century England	1	(19)
Alan Houston
Steve Pincus
The question of secularization	20	(21)
Blair Worden
`Meer religion' and the `church---state' of Restoration England: the impact and ideology of James II's declarations of indulgence	41	(30)
Mark Knights
Radicals, reformers and republicans: academic language and political discourse in Restoration London	71	(29)
Gary S. De Krey
The family in the exclusion crisis: Locke versus Filmer revisited	100	(25)
Rachel Weil
Understanding popular politics in Restoration Britain	125	(29)
Tim Harris
The War in Heaven and the Miltonic sublime	154	(26)
Nicholas von Maltzahn
The Cowleyan Pindaric ode and sublime diversions	180	(31)
Joshua Scodel
Plays as property, 1660--1710	211	(30)
Paulina Kewes
Republicanism, the politics of necessity and the rule of law	241	(31)
Alan Houston
From holy cause to economic interest: the study of population and the invention of the state	272	(27)
Steve Pincus
Natural philosophy and political periodization: interregnum, restoration and revolution	299	(30)
Barbara Shapiro
Index	329