Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.

James VI and I: Kingship, Government and Religion brings together early career and established scholars with a range of approaches to the reign. Their original, research-based essays on a series of broad and interconnected topics invite us to consider Jacobean kingship afresh.King James VI and I (1566-1625) was the first monarch to rule over the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland. His practice of kingship – which often so skilfully played upon, and navigated b...

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.

Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of secur...

This is a new biography of a Catholic martyr exploring the complicated and controversial story of her demise. The story of Margaret Clitherow represents one of the most important yet troubling events in post-Reformation history. Her trial, execution and subsequent legend have provoked controversy ever since it became a cause celebre in the time of Elizabeth I. Through extensive new research into the contemporary accounts of her arrest and trial the authors have pieced together a new readin...

Catholics and Treason takes the narratives generated by the contemporary law of treason as it applied to Roman Catholics, during and after the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century, and uses them to explore the Catholic community's writing of its own history. Prosecutions of Catholics under the existing law and via new legislation produced a great deal of documentation which tells us much about contemporary politics that we could not garner from any other source. The ...

All Hail to the Archpriest revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England as the 'Archpriest controversy'. Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The publish...

Thoroughly updated with newly discovered archival material, this second edition of The Trials of Margaret Clitherow demonstrates that the complicated and controversial life story of Margaret Clitherow is not as unique as it was once thought. In fact, Peter Lake and Michael Questier argue that her case was comparable to those of other separatist females who were in trouble with the law at the same time, in particular Anne Foster, also of York. In doing so, they shed new light on th...

To an extraordinary extent everyone in Britain still lives under the shadow of the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. It was a massive, brutal and terrifying event, which completely changed the governments of England, Scotland and Ireland and which was only achieved through overwhelming violence. Revolution brilliantly captures the sense that this was a great turning point in Britain's history, but also shows how severe a price was paid to achieve this.

Eileen Power's "Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535" offers a groundbreaking exploration of the socio-economic and spiritual lives of English nuns during a transformative period in medieval history. Power meticulously examines a wealth of primary sources, blending rigorous historical analysis with vivid narrative flair, to illuminate the complex roles that nunneries played in their communities. Through her discerning lens, she captures the tensions between monastic life and the encr...

In "Bibliomania; or Book-Madness," Thomas Frognall Dibdin explores the fervent obsession with books and the culture surrounding bibliophilia during the early 19th century. This work is marked by Dibdin's exuberant prose, which expertly intertwines humor, critique, and a sense of wonder. The literary context is steeped in Romanticism, where the glorification of individual passion finds a particular resonance in the pursuit of books. Dibdin provides vivid descriptions of the eccentricities o...