CONTENTS:

Seventeenth-Century Society: Structures and Beliefs
   Social Mobility in England 1500-1700
   Providence: The Doctrine and Its Uses
   Witchcraft and Society

The European Context
   Britain and Europe in the Seventeenth Century

Economic Practice and Theory
   Tawney’s Century
   Consumer Industries and the Political Economists
   Social Effects of Change in Agriculture
   The Changing Pattern of Labouring Life
   Economics and Politics in the Seventeenth Century

Towards Civil War
   The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I
   The Revolt of the Provinces
   Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution
   Religion and Politics: The Godly People

Political Thought and Philosophy
   The Leveller Theorists: Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn
   The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought
   Harrington’s Interpretation of His Age
   The Royalists and Sir Robert Filmer

Science and the Royal Society
   The Nature of the Early Royal Society
   Restoration, Reformation and the Origins of the Royal Society

Literature and the Arts
   The Metaphysical Poets
   Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I
   Milton’s Verse
   Milton’s Grand Style
   Milton’s Austerity and Moral Disdain
   The Precursors of Defoe: Puritanism and the Rise of the Novel
   Dryden’s Absalom