"Antonia Lolordo presents an original interpretation of John Locke's conception of moral agency (one that has implications both for his metaphysics and for the foundations of his political theory. Locke denies that species boundaries exist independently of human convention, hold…
The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself--variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order--was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, f…
The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the proje…
Seventeenth-century England has long been heralded as the birthplace of a so-called 'new' philosophy. Yet what contemporaries might have understood by 'old' philosophy has been little appreciated. In this book Dmitri Levitin examines English attitudes to ancient philosophy in un…
In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the cont…
"Based on analysis of a diary kept by Constantijn Huygens Jr, the secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, this book proposes a new explanation for the invention of the modern, private diary in the 17th century. At the same time it sketches a panoramic view of Europe at t…
This new reading of Milton's epic poem demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence to the individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. It also shows how Milton radically revised…
A year after the death of James I in 1625, a sensational pamphlet accused the Duke of Buckingham of murdering the king. It was an allegation that would haunt English politics for nearly forty years. In this exhaustively researched new book, two leading scholars of the era, Alast…
King Charles I's execution in January 1649 marked a moment of deliverance for the victors in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, but for thousands of Royalists it signaled the onset of more than a decade of penury and disillusionment in exile. Driven by an enduring allegiance to the…
Balancing long-overlooked and well-known works from early modern England, "Same-sex desire in early modern England, 1550-1735: an anthology of literary texts and contexts" is a collection of English texts about homoerotic love, relationships, desires, and sexual acts. The anthol…