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The life of Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher (1581–1656) as primate, politician and intellectual heavyweight, offers a rich subject for study.
Whilst first and foremost a literary scholar who focuses on the work of John Milton (1608–74), David Loewenstein has, in recent years, done much to undertake and encourage interdisciplinary research into the religio-political culture of early modern England.
John Edwards’s new biography of Cardinal Reginald Pole, part of Ashgate’s Archbishops of Canterbury Series, is a magnificent example of first-rate historical scholarship. Reginald Pole is no easy subject.
Donald Hankey was – and has remained – one of the most enigmatic personalities to feature in the narrative of the Great War.
Gemma Allen’s well-conceived and meticulously researched first book explores the ways in which themes of education, piety and politics interacted and impacted on the lives of the Cooke sisters in late 16th-century England.
Post-reformation English Catholicism continues to be a flourishing and popular field of enquiry. In recent years this upsurge of interest has been paralleled by an increasing body of work on early modern ‘superstition’ and popular religion.
Many books on topics related to the medieval Bible have appeared in recent years, usually collections of essays by different authors, and a lot of them have been disappointing in their lack of overall focus and variable scholarly quality. The volume under review in the Manchester Medieval Studies series is a single-author work with a clear aim, and is rigorously scholarly throughout.
Preaching before James I early in his reign, Anthony Maxey told the King that predestination ‘containeth the whole summe of our religion’ (p. 1). The 17th article of the Church of England’s doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles, had been statutory since 1571, and outlined a belief in predestination.
The three editors are all senior lecturers at the University of Birmingham in the department of English Literature and the volume is the result of a one day colloquium that was held at Stratford by the department in June 2010 under the auspices of the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies at Birmingham. The intention of the interdisciplinary day was to study the cultural significance
This important work provides the first informed, well-researched and highly nuanced account of the fortunes of ‘occult’ thought and practice in England from the middle decades of the 17th century to its demise at the end of the 18th century.