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  3. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research within broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers.

  • General Editors: Michael Braddick, University of Oxford, Krista Kesselring, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge

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81 results in Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

Page 1 of 5

Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in early modern London
  • Emily Vine
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Early modern London has long been recognised as a centre of religious diversity, yet the role of the home as the setting of religious practice for all faiths has been largely overlooked. In contrast, this study offers the first examination of domestic religion in London during a period of intense religious change, between the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Gordon Riots of 1780. Emily Vine considers both Christian and Jewish practices, comparing the experiences of Catholics, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, Huguenots, and Protestants alike. Through its focus on the crowded metropolis as a place where households of different faiths coexisted, this study explores how religious communities operated beyond and in parallel to places of public worship. Vine demonstrates how families of different faiths experienced childbirth and death, arguing that homes became 'permeable' settings of communal religion at critical moments of the life cycle. By focusing on practices beyond the synagogue, meeting house, or church, this book demonstrates the vitality of collective devotion and kinship throughout the long eighteenth century.

The Settlement of the Poor in England, c.1660–1780
  • Law, Society, and State Formation
  • Naomi Tadmor
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • In 1662, in the aftermath of the Restoration, parliament passed new legislation for the settlement and removal of the poor. Important provisions were finalised in no more than a few days. But once the settlement of the poor was set in law it became an agent of historical change that affected society, state formation, and the lives of millions in Britain and beyond for centuries to come. Within a few decades, practices of local government were transformed. In towns and villages hierarchies of social status and gender were affected. The rising empire employed the settlement administration to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars and to deal with soldiers' wives and children left behind. The huge number of bureaucratic forms generated following the new policies made a lasting impact on administrative culture. The Settlement of the Poor in England is about social change and about history's unintended consequences. It is also about the struggles and experiences of individuals and communities. It reminds us how the settlement legislation still resonates today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Protestant Bodies
  • Gesture in the English Reformation
  • Arnold Hunt
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • Religious worship is an embodied act, consisting not of words alone, but of words and gestures. But what did early modern English Protestants think they were doing when they went through the motions of worship? In Protestant Bodies, Arnold Hunt argues that the English Reformation was a gestural reformation that redefined the postures and motions of the body. Drawing on a rich array of primary sources, he shows how gestures inherited from the medieval liturgy took on new meanings within a drastically altered ritual landscape, and became central to the enforcement of religious uniformity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestant Bodies presents a challenging new interpretation of the English Reformation as a series of experiments in shaping and remaking the body, both individual and collective, with consequences that still persist today.

Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547
  • Laura Flannigan
  • Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • The dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace. This book presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late medieval and early modern England. Delving into the rich but little-studied archive of the royal Court of Requests, it reconstructs collaborations between sovereigns and subjects on the formulation of an important governmental ideal: justice. Examining the institutional and social dimensions of this point of contact, this study places ordinary people, their knowledge and demands at the heart of a judicial revolution unfolding within the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet it also demonstrates that directing extraordinary royal justice into ordinary procedures created as many problems as it solved.

On Laudianism
  • Piety, Polemic and Politics During the Personal Rule of Charles I
  • Peter Lake
  • Published online:
    05 October 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • Laudianism was both a way of being Christian and a political ideology. This definitive account establishes the theological roots and political resonances of Laudianism, and shows how it was based on the recuperation of the theological principles and ecclesiastical and pietistic ambitions that underpinned it. Peter Lake shows how the Laudians' famous obsession with the beauty of holiness contained a plan for the reinvigoration of both the church and the state. It represented a self-conscious reaction against the long-term evils of puritanism and of the immediate political crisis of the 1620s, caused in turn by the evils of (an often puritan) popularity. The result was a coherent account of the theological, liturgical and political essence of the Church of England. On Laudianism explores how this intensely controversial movement, and the strong reactions it provoked, helped cause the English Civil War, but over the long term provided one of the visions of the national church, one that has been in contention to define 'Anglicanism' ever since.

Gender and Policing in Early Modern England
  • Jonah Miller
  • Published online:
    07 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • This book traces the beginnings of a shift from one model of gendered power to another. Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, traditional practices of local government by heads of household began to be undermined by new legal ideas about what it meant to hold office. In London, this enabled the emergence of a new kind of officeholding and a new kind of policing, rooted in a fraternal culture of official masculinity. London officers arrested, searched, and sometimes assaulted people on the basis of gendered suspicions, especially poorer women. Gender and Policing in Early Modern England describes how a recognisable form of gendered policing emerged from practices of local government by patriarchs and addresses wider questions about the relationship between gender and the state.

Friends, Neighbours, Sinners
  • Religious Difference and English Society, 1689–1750
  • Carys Brown
  • Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • Friends, Neighbours, Sinners demonstrates the fundamental ways in which religious difference shaped English society in the first half of the eighteenth century. By examining the social subtleties of interactions between people of differing beliefs, and how they were mediated through languages and behaviours common to the long eighteenth century, Carys Brown examines the graduated layers of religious exclusivity that influenced everyday existence. By doing so, the book points towards a new approach to the social and cultural history of the eighteenth century, one that acknowledges the integral role of the dynamics of religious difference in key aspects of eighteenth-century life. This book therefore proposes not just to add to current understanding of religious coexistence in this period, but to shift our ways of thinking about the construction of social discourses, parish politics, and cultural spaces in eighteenth-century England.

The Enclosure of Knowledge
  • Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800
  • James D. Fisher
  • Published online:
    07 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022
  • The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism.

Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England
  • Harriet Lyon
  • Published online:
    08 October 2021
    Print publication:
    21 October 2021
  • The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries after the dissolution. Harriet Lyon argues that our understanding of this historical moment is enriched by taking a long chronological view of the suppression, by exploring how it was remembered to those who witnessed it and how this memory evolved in subsequent generations. Exposing and repudiating the assumptions of a conventional historiography that has long been coloured by Henrician narratives and sources, this book reveals that the fall of the religious houses was remembered as one of the most profound and controversial transformations of the entire English Reformation.

England's Second Reformation
  • The Battle for the Church of England 1625–1662
  • Anthony Milton
  • Published online:
    05 October 2021
    Print publication:
    14 October 2021
  • England's Second Reformation reassesses the religious upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England, situating them within the broader history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Rather than seeing the Civil War years as a destructive aberration, Anthony Milton demonstrates how they were integral to (and indeed the climax of) the Church of England's early history. All religious groups – parliamentarian and royalist alike – envisaged changes to the pre-war church, and all were forced to adapt their religious ideas and practices in response to the tumultuous events. Similarly, all saw themselves and their preferred reforms as standing in continuity with the Church's earlier history. By viewing this as a revolutionary 'second Reformation', which necessarily involved everyone and forced them to reconsider what the established church was and how its past should be understood, Milton presents a compelling case for rethinking England's religious history.

The Rule of Manhood
  • Tyranny, Gender, and Classical Republicanism in England, 1603–1660
  • Jamie A. Gianoutsos
  • Published online:
    26 January 2021
    Print publication:
    10 December 2020
  • Through stories of lustful and incestuous rulers, of republican revolution and of unnatural crimes against family, seventeenth-century Englishmen imagined the problem of tyranny through the prism of classical history. This fuelled debates over the practices of their own kings, the necessity of revolution, and the character of English republican thought. The Rule of Manhood explores the dynamic and complex languages of tyranny and masculinity that arose through these classical stories and their imaginative appropriation. Discerning the neglected connection between concepts of power and masculinity in early Stuart England, Jamie A. Gianoutsos shows both how stories of ancient tyranny were deployed in the dialogue around monarchy and rule between 1603 and 1660 and the extent to which these shaped English classical republican thought. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary printed texts, Gianoutsos persuasively weaves together the histories of politics and manhood to make a bold claim: that the fundamental purpose of English republicanism was not liberty or virtue, but the realisation of manhood for its citizens.

Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland, c.1560–1707
  • Karin Bowie
  • Published online:
    21 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • In early modern Scotland, religious and constitutional tensions created by Protestant reform and regal union stimulated the expression and regulation of opinion at large. Karin Bowie explores the rising prominence and changing dynamics of Scottish opinion politics in this tumultuous period. Assessing protestations, petitions, oaths, and oral and written modes of public communication, she addresses major debates on the fitness of the Habermasian model of the public sphere. This study provides a historicised understanding of early modern public opinion, investigating how the crown and its opponents sought to shape opinion at large; the forms and language in which collective opinions were represented; and the difference this made to political outcomes. Focusing on modes of persuasive communication, it reveals the reworking of traditional vehicles into powerful tools for public resistance, allowing contemporaries to recognise collective opinion outside authorised assemblies and encouraging state efforts to control seemingly dangerous opinions.

The Making of an Imperial Polity
  • Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis
  • Lauren Working
  • Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • Bringing to life the interaction between America, its peoples, and metropolitan gentlemen in early seventeenth-century England, this book argues that colonization did not just operate on the peripheries of the political realm, and confronts the entangled histories of colonialism and domestic status and governance. The Jacobean era is reframed as a definitive moment in which the civil self-presentation of the elite increasingly became implicated in the imperial. The tastes and social lives of statesmen contributed to this shift in the English political gaze. At the same time, bringing English political civility in dialogue with Native American beliefs and practices speaks to inherent tensions in the state's civilizing project and the pursuit of refinement through empire. This significant reassessment of Jacobean political culture reveals how colonizing America transformed English civility and demonstrates how metropolitan politics and social relations were uniquely shaped by territorial expansion beyond the British Isles. This title is also available as Open Access.

The Poverty of Disaster
  • Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • Tawny Paul
  • Published online:
    27 September 2019
    Print publication:
    17 October 2019
  • Eighteenth-century Britain is often understood as a time of commercial success, economic growth, and improving living standards. Yet during this period, tens of thousands of men and women were imprisoned for failing to pay their debts. The Poverty of Disaster tells their stories, focusing on the experiences of the middle classes who enjoyed opportunities for success on one hand, but who also faced the prospect of downward social mobility. Tawny Paul examines the role that debt insecurity played within society and the fragility of the credit relations that underpinned commercial activity, livelihood, and social status. She demonstrates how, for the middle classes, insecurity took economic, social, and embodied forms. It shaped the work that people did, their social status, their sense of self, their bodily autonomy, and their relationships with others. In an era of growing debt and the squeeze of the middle class, The Poverty of Disaster offers a new history of capitalism and takes a long view of the financial insecurities that plague our own uncertain times.

Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750
  • Naomi Pullin
  • Published online:
    15 May 2018
    Print publication:
    24 May 2018
  • Quaker women were unusually active participants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural and religious exchange, as ministers, missionaries, authors and spiritual leaders. Drawing upon documentary evidence, with a focus on women's personal writings and correspondence, Naomi Pullin explores the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750. Through a comparative methodology, focused on Britain and the North American colonies, Pullin examines the experiences of both those women who travelled and preached and those who stayed at home. The book approaches the study of gender and religion from a new perspective by placing women's roles, relationships and identities at the centre of the analysis. It shows how the movement's transition from 'sect to church' enhanced the authority and influence of women within the movement and uncovers the multifaceted ways in which female Friends at all levels were active participants in making and sustaining transatlantic Quakerism.

The Reformation of the Decalogue
  • Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c.1485–1625
  • Jonathan Willis
  • Published online:
    12 October 2017
    Print publication:
    12 October 2017
  • The Reformation of the Decalogue tells two important but previously untold stories: of how the English Reformation transformed the meaning of the Ten Commandments, and of the ways in which the Ten Commandments helped to shape the English Reformation itself. Adopting a thematic structure, it contributes new insights to the history of the English Reformation, covering topics such as monarchy and law, sin and salvation, and Puritanism and popular religion. It includes, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of surviving Elizabethan and Early Stuart 'commandment boards' in parish churches, and presents a series of ten case studies on the Commandments themselves, exploring their shifting meanings and significance in the hands of Protestant reformers. Willis combines history, theology, art history and musicology, alongside literary and cultural studies, to explore this surprisingly neglected but significant topic in a work that refines our understanding of British history from the 1480s to 1625.

Carnal Knowledge
  • Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600
  • Martin Ingram
  • Published online:
    13 July 2017
    Print publication:
    10 March 2017
  • How was the law used to control sex in Tudor England? What were the differences between secular and religious practice? This major study reveals that - contrary to what historians have often supposed - in pre-Reformation England both ecclesiastical and secular (especially urban) courts were already highly active in regulating sex. They not only enforced clerical celibacy and sought to combat prostitution but also restrained the pre- and extramarital sexual activities of laypeople more generally. Initially destabilising, the religious and institutional changes of 1530–60 eventually led to important new developments that tightened the regime further. There were striking innovations in the use of shaming punishments in provincial towns and experiments in the practice of public penance in the church courts, while Bridewell transformed the situation in London. Allowing the clergy to marry was a milestone of a different sort. Together these changes contributed to a marked shift in the moral climate by 1600.

The Political Bible in Early Modern England
  • Kevin Killeen
  • Published online:
    20 January 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained, across the century, from top to bottom and across all religious positions. It shows how constitutional thought, in this most tumultuous era of civil war, regicide and republic, was forged on the Bible, and how writers ranging from King James, Joseph Hall or John Milton to Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes can be better understood in the context of such vigorous biblical discourse.

Martial Law and English Laws, c.1500–c.1700
  • John M. Collins
  • Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016
  • John M. Collins presents the first comprehensive history of martial law in the early modern period. He argues that rather than being a state of exception from law, martial law was understood and practiced as one of the King's laws. Further, it was a vital component of both England's domestic and imperial legal order. It was used to quell rebellions during the Reformation, to subdue Ireland, to regulate English plantations like Jamestown, to punish spies and traitors in the English Civil War, and to build forts on Jamaica. Through outlining the history of martial law, Collins reinterprets English legal culture as dynamic, politicized, and creative, where jurists were inspired by past practices to generate new law rather than being restrained by it. This work asks that legal history once again be re-integrated into the cultural and political histories of early modern England and its empire.

Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England
  • Noah Millstone
  • Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    19 May 2016
  • In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone provides the first systematic account of the production, circulation and reception of these manuscript pamphlets. By placing them in the context of social change, state formation, and the emergence of 'politic' expertise, Millstone uses the pamphlets to resolve one of the central problems of early Stuart history: how and why did the men and women of early seventeenth-century England come to see their world as political?

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