Designed to contribute to a greater understanding of the religious foundations of seventeenth century political writing, this study offers a detailed exploration of the significance of the figure and story of Adam at that time. The book investigates seventeenth-century writings from England and New England-examining writings by Roger Williams and John Eliot, Gerrard Winstanley, John Milton, and John Locke-to explore the varying significance afforded to the Biblical figure of Adam in theories of the polity. In so doing, it counters over-simplified views of modern secular political thought breaking free from the confines of religion, by showing the diversity of political models and possibilities that Adamic theories supported. It provides contextual background for the appreciation of seventeenth-century culture and other cultural artefacts, and feeds into current scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and in stories of origins and Creation.

Designed to contribute to a greater understanding of the religious foundations of seventeenth century political writing, this study offers a detailed exploration of the significance of the figure and story of Adam at that time. The book investigates seventeenth-century writings from England and New England-examining writings by Roger Williams and John Eliot, Gerrard Winstanley, John Milton, and John Locke-to explore the varying significance afforded to the Biblical figure of Adam in theories of the polity. In so doing, it counters over-simplified views of modern secular political thought breaking free from the confines of religion, by showing the diversity of political models and possibilities that Adamic theories supported. It provides contextual background for the appreciation of seventeenth-century culture and other cultural artefacts, and feeds into current scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and in stories of origins and Creation.

Presents an ambitious narrative and fresh re-assessment of common law and natural law's varied interactions in America, 1630 to 1930.

Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the "century of revolution." By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period's battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the Interregnum government, the Restoration of Charles II, the Exclusion Crisis, the deposition of James II, the ascent of William and Mary, and Anne's failure to produce a surviving heir, this study provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family in England. Beginning with a reconsideration of Jacobean patriarchalism, Familial Forms focuses on the work of John Milton,Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell. From their contrasting political and gendered positions, these authors contemplated and contested the relevance of marriage and kinship to government. Their writing illuminates two crucial elements of England's conflicts. First, the formal qualities of poems and prose tracts reveal that not only was there a competition among different versions of the family-state analogy, but also a competition over its very status as an analogy. Second, through their negotiations of linear and nonlinear forms, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell demonstrate the centrality of temporality to the period's political battles. Through close textual analysis of poetry, political tracts, parliamentary records, and nonliterary genealogies, Familial Forms offers a fresh understanding of the seventeenth-century politics of genealogy. It also provides new answers to long-standing critical questions about the poetic form of canonical works, such as Paradise Lost and Absalom and Achitophel, and illuminates the political significance of newly-canonical works by women writers, including Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeoreum, Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, and Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature connects changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major paradigm shift — from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations. The book also demonstrates that shifting early modern perspectives on Judeo-Christian relations deeply inform the period's interlocking reassessments of maternal nurture and the nation, especially in the case of Milton. The book's five chapters analyze a wide range of reformed and traditional texts, including A pitiless Mother, William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. Equal attention is paid to such early modern visual images as The power of women (a late sixteenth-century Dutch engraving), William Marshall's engraved frontispiece to Richard Braithwaite's The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (1641), and Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Pero and Cimon or Roman Charity (1630). The book argues that competing early modern figurations of the nurturing mother mediate in politically implicated ways between customary biblical models of English kingship and innovative Hebraic/Puritan paradigms of Englishness.