Hobbes's Elements of Law was written in 1640, on the eve of the English Civil War. It circulated in manuscript, and eleven manuscripts now survive. Two of them contain a substantial amount of material in Hobbes's own handwriting. Soon after writing it, Hobbes fled to France, while in England civil war broke out over many of the issues discussed by Hobbes in this book. In France he wrote a Latin version of his political theory (De Cive, on the Citizen), and then the English Leviathan, of which a Latin revision followed and in which he greatly expanded what he had to say about religion and church-state relations. The Elements of Law presents a complete but succinct version of Hobbes's political theory and of his more general philosophy. It analyzes the nature of knowledge and science, discusses psychology and human nature, surveys the rights and duties of individuals, and argues for the need of states to be governed by sovereign authority. It discusses the relationship between politics and religion, and the extent and limitations of political power. It is 'a work of extraordinary assurance, an almost fully fledged statement of Hobbes's entire political philosophy'. (Noel Malcolm) This edition is intended to replace the one edited by Ferdinand Tönnies (1889), from which that of J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford World's Classics, 1994) derives. It establishes a more accurate text based on all the eleven known manuscripts, and includes much material omitted by Tönnies (who knew of only six manuscripts). It draws extensively on modern scholarship on Hobbes and his contexts.

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

An illustrated quarterly.