Providing a fresh appraisal of the art of Anglo-Saxon England, this text looks at its influence upon the creation of an identity as a nation.

New scrutinies of the most important political and religious debates of the post-Reformation period. The consequences of the Reformation and the church/state polity it created have always been an area of important scholarly debate. The essays in this volume, by many of the leading scholars of the period, revisit many of the important issues during the period from the Henrician Reformation to the Glorious Revolution: theology, political structures, the relationship of theology and secular ideologies, and the Civil War. Topics include Puritan networks and nomenclature in England and in the New World; examinations of the changing theology of the Church in the century after the Reformation; the evolving relationship of art and protestantism; the providentialist thinking of Charles I;the operation of the penal laws against Catholics; and protestantism in the localities of Yorkshire and Norwich. KENNETH FINCHAM is Reader in History at the University of Kent; Professor PETER LAKE teaches in the Department of History at Princeton University. Contributors: THOMAS COGSWELL, RICHARD CUST, PATRICK COLLINSON, THOMAS FREEMAN, PETER LAKE, SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE, DIARMAID MACCULLOCH, ANTHONY MILTON, PAUL SEAVER, WILLIAM SHEILS

This intriguing book draws for the first time a complete picture of the artistic and political connections between Rubens and the Stuart court. Fiona Donovan examines the works the great Flemish artist created for English patrons, his relationships with English courtiers beginning in 1616, and his nine-month diplomatic mission to London in 1629–30. She focuses particular attention on the series of nine canvases that Rubens painted for the Banqueting House ceiling of Whitehall Palace—a project that is considered by many to be the most significant work of art ever commissioned by the English Crown. Rubens’s iconographic scheme for the Whitehall ceiling presented English courtiers with a complex pictorial language not seen before in Great Britain. Donovan explores the artist’s allegorical imagery and provides fresh insights into the role the work of Rubens and continental culture played in politics and society at the court of Charles I.