ABSTRACT This essay explores the role that early modern English conduct books took in influencing how servants were exhorted to accept slave-like treatment, while concurrently being instructed in religion as a member of their master’s family. The ideological content of conduct books, I suggest, helped prepare the way for indentured servants being sent to the Virginia Colony under conditions increasingly approximating slavery. I read John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s play A Very Woman as an astute contemporary analysis of the continuum between slavery and servitude in early seventeenth-century England, reflecting not just their satire of the advice available in the conduct books but also its impact on the growing religious diversity of seventeenth-century England and the importation of servants to Virginia.

ABSTRACT In the 1630s, two central cultural arbiters sought to eliminate the figure of the fool from English culture. Both the city and court decried fools as figures of past barbarism. Yet, as this article seeks to demonstrate, rather than eliminating the fool from plays, Caroline playwrights rework the fool to go undetected within the social reform of the court and by the more radical anti-theatrical writers. By doing so, Caroline playwrights in effect allowed any intellect in early modern London to fool. The article examines three bodies of writing (court censorship records, antitheatrical writing and the Caroline plays themselves), to trace how this modified fool becomes rearticulated as a city wit, who still maintains the responsibilities of a fool.

ABSTRACT When King Charles I was beheaded in 1649 it incited a series of events in the Reformed city of Geneva. The Civil Wars and Regicide uncovered the political and religious tensions within Geneva during the English Civil Wars. In Geneva, two important bodies, the Small Council of civil magistrates and the Company of Pastors jockeyed for an appropriate response from their diverse members. Additionally, the leaders of Geneva had to respond to English and Continental rumours that they were to blame for England’s woes. Utilizing archival research, this article examines the transnational implications of the English Civil Wars and it shows that the Genevans had far from a unified view of the Civil Wars. Ultimately, the primary fear for the leaders in Geneva was not necessarily the death of a king, but instead that they would be associated with the worst aspects of the Radical Reformation: Anabaptism.

ABSTRACT This essay makes a case for identifying the ‘late court-Poet’ to whom Milton alludes in both editions of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Common-wealth as the royalist poet John Cleveland, who died in 1658. Beginning with the difficulties critics and editors have previously encountered in identifying possible referents for Milton’s allusion, it proposes a new interpretative framework for the reference which is consistent with Milton’s polemical strategies, and which supports the suggestion that Cleveland might well have been his target. Drawing on new archival and textual evidence, as well as on recent scholarship, it sets out reasons for considering Cleveland a rival and enemy of interest for Milton from the 1630s onwards, and especially in the fraught moments of early 1660 when a restoration of the Stuart monarchy seemed – to Milton’s evident horror and despair – increasingly likely. In doing so, it revises familiar perceptions of Cleveland’s writings, readership, reputation and networks, offering a fresh view which illuminates a key aspect of Milton’s polemical focus in early 1660.

ABSTRACT The enactment of religious change through Parliament during the Reformation gave it a central role in shaping the church in England; this role deepened in the mid-seventeenth century. The House of Commons 1640-1660 project, recently published, revealed complexity and variety in MPs’ response, as well as the impossibility of pinpointing the views of many. Staunch adherents of the episcopal national church as led by Archbishop Laud sooner or later disappeared from the House. Among the rest, many of whom were involved in some way in religious matters and some of whom brought experience of other ecclesiologies, views evolved over time. Few MPs emerge as consistent Presbyterians; the Westminster Assembly attracted suspicion; the Presbyterian settlement of 1645 was from the start visibly ignored. There was significant enthusiasm for a state church, but no agreement on its form. ‘Independents’ differed markedly in their response to ‘heresy’ and acceptance of toleration.

ABSTRACT Much attention has been paid to the ‘puritan’ clergy who refused to conform to the Act of Uniformity in 1662 but far less has been focused on those ministers of the revolution who chose to remain within what became the Anglican church, accepting the re-imposition of an episcopal administration and mandatory use of the Book of Common Prayer. This essay aims to stimulate greater interest in these men, arguing that despite the assumption that most of the ‘revolutionary’ clergy left the church in 1662, in fact three quarters of them chose to remain. It discusses possible factors for this statistic and compares the career paths that resulted from conformity in two English counties, highlighting some of the problems of researching the ministry in this period. It concludes with an examination of clerical decision-making in 1662, seen primarily through the eyes, and records, of the Somerset minister, John Chetwynd.

"The Devil from over the Sea: remembering and forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland." The Seventeenth Century, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

ABSTRACT Among highly-educated Ottomans letter-writing was not simply a means of practical communication but an art in itself and a significant aspect of Ottoman literary culture. Collections of exemplary letters from the seventeenth century survive in considerable numbers, but they have been neglected as literary and historical sources due largely to the complexity of their rhymed, rhetorical prose and to a modern belief that they were mostly empty bombast. This article, based on a composite collection of letters by the six most eminent writers of the 1620s, examines the nature of this kind of prose, known as inşa (construction, creative composition), and the purposes behind such letters. It assesses how contemporaries evaluated such writing and why it was admired; how rhetorical prose might contribute to the maintenance of friendships; and how petitions in the form of literary letters helped create essential patron-client relationships.

ABSTRACT This essay argues that we should understand Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson as secretaries in the practically activist humanist tradition. Both women served as keepers of (family and political) secrets, and as readers, writers, and record keepers of papers. Hutchinson calls herself ‘the faithful depository’ of her husband’s ‘secrets’, and alludes to her facility with his signature, or ‘character’, throughout the Memoirs. In many ways, the Memoirs themselves are a vindication of his belief in her capacities. Margaret Cavendish similarly presents herself as her husband’s secretary, including in her ‘Life of William Cavendish’ not only a robust and notably politic account of her husband’s expenditures on behalf of the monarchy – ‘a Computation of My Lord’s Losses’ – but also a record of ‘some Essayes and Discourses of My Lords, together with some Notes and Remarques of mine own’. In doing so, Cavendish remarshalls the consiliary wisdom of William Cavendish’s own advice to princes as ballast for his continued political relevance and for her own secretarial and advisory competency.