A fresh reading of Marvell's most important works, exploring the variety and complexity of his approaches to contemporary religious and political events. Andrew Marvell's celebrated poetic ambivalence to the philosophical, political and religious controversies of mid-seventeenth century England is the subject of this book, which includes major new historical readings of his most important lyrics and political verse, incorporating material from hitherto unpublished contemporary manuscripts. It places the poetic imagination of Marvell and his contemporaries - such as John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, Margaret Cavendish, William Davenant, and Thomas Fairfax - into the context of the turbulent public events of the time; and demonstrates Marvell's hitherto unnoticed connection with the liberal, rational and sceptical thinkers associated with the Great Tew circle. It also argues that Marvell's "middle way" in theology is bound up with his ambivalence towards the Calvinist God. Takashi Yoshinaka took his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, and is Professor of English in the Graduate School of Letters, Hiroshima University.

Remembering the English Civil Wars is the first collection of essays to explore how the bloody struggle which took place between the supporters of king and parliament during the 1640s was viewed in retrospect. The English Civil Wars were perhaps the most calamitous series of conflicts in the country’s recorded history. Over the past twenty years there has been a surge of interest in the way that the Civil Wars were remembered by the men, women and children who were unfortunate enough to live through them. The essays brought together in this book not only provide a clear and accessible introduction to this fast-developing field of study but also bring together the voices of a diverse group of scholars who are working at its cutting edge. Through the investigation of a broad, but closely interrelated, range of topics – including elite, popular, urban and local memories of the wars, as well as the relationships between civil war memory and ceremony, material culture and concepts of space and place – the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, with exceptional vividness and clarity, how the people of England and Wales continued to be haunted by the ghosts of the mid-century conflict throughout the decades which followed. The book will be essential reading for all students of the English Civil Wars, Stuart Britain and the history of memory.

'[A] marvellously original, densely researched study of the English republican imagination.' Tom Paulin, The Independent

Considering the variety of charts, diagrams and other kinds of images with which early modern printed books are copiously illustrated, this volume interrogates how visual rhetoric affected verbal expression. The genres of illustration considered include military strategy and tactics, garden design, instrumentation, Bibles, scientific schema, drawing instruction, natural history, comparative anatomy and Aesop's Fables. The book develops novel methods of using printed images as evidence in the interpretation of the rich, strange and beautiful literature of early modern England.