Focussing on Quaker pamphlet literature of the commonwealth and restoration period, Catie Gill seeks to explore and explain women’s presence as activists, writers, and subjects within the early Quaker movement. Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community draws on contemporary resources such as prophetic writing, prison narratives, petitions, and deathbed testimonies to produce an account of women’s involvement in the shaping of this religious movement. The book reveals that, far from...

William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contribu...

New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650—1800 takes a fresh look at archival and printed sources from England and America, elucidating why women were instrumental to the Quaker movement from its inception to its establishment as a transatlantic religious body. This authoritative volume, the first collection to focus entirely on the contributions of women, is a landmark study of their distinctive religious and gendered identities. The chapters connect three richly woven th...

Framed by the publication of Leviathan and the 1713 Licensing Act, this collection provides analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts within the scope of an eighty-year period of theatre history, allowing for definition and assessment that uncouples Restoration drama from eighteenth-century drama. Individual essays demonstrate the significant contrasts between the theatre of different decades and the context of performance, paying special attention to the literary innovation and s...

In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. ...