This is an extensive study of the 16th and 17th century belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, try and chastise. It seeks to shed light on the reception, character and broader cultural repercussions of the Reformation.

This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.

Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

This volume explores the role of belief in the existence of angels in the early modern world.

Seventeen distinguished historians of early modern Britain pay tribute to an outstanding scholar and teacher, presenting reviews of major areas of debate.

The spiritual status of the early modern child was often confused and uncertain, and yet in the wake of the English Reformation became an issue of urgent interest. This book explores questions surrounding early modern childhood, focusing especially on some of the extreme religious experiences in which children are documented: those of demonic possession and godly prophecy. Dr French argues that despite the fact that these occurrences were not typical childhood experiences, they provide us with a window through which to glimpse the world of early modern children. The work introduces its readers to the dualistic nature of early modern perceptions of their young - they were seen to be both close to devilish temptations and to God’s divine finger, as illustrated by published accounts of possession and prophecy. These cases reveal to us moments in which children could be granted authority or in which writers and publishers framed children in positions of spiritual agency. This can tell us much about how early modern society perceived, imagined and depicted their young, and helps us to revise the notion that early modern children’s lives, which were often fleeting, may have gone unregarded. Both contributing to, and informed by, some of the most recent historiographical directions taken by early modern history, this book engages with three key areas: the history of extreme spiritual experience such as demonic possession, the ’lived experience’ of early modern religion and the history of childhood. In this way, it offers the first scholarly exploration of the dialogue between these three areas of current and widespread historical interest which have, perhaps surprisingly, not yet been considered together.

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.

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 project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; it was mediated in numerous forms, as pictures, songs, and embroideries, and as proverbs, commonplaces, and quotations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of fields, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1530-1700 explores how the scriptures served as a generative motor for ideas, and a resource for creative and political thought, as well as for domestic and devotional life. Sections tackle the knotty issues of translation, the rich range of early modern biblical scholarship, Bible dissemination and circulation, the changing political uses of the Bible, literary appropriations and responses, and the reception of the text across a range of contexts and media. Where existing scholarship focuses, typically, on Tyndale and the King James Bible of 1611, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1530-1700 goes further, tracing the vibrant and shifting landscape of biblical culture in the two centuries following the Reformation.