'A book that stays with you and widens your perception of how people and place intertwine' MATT COLLINSFor over five decades, Beth Lynch has been repeatedly drawn to a rocky spot on the North Cornwall coast, where her earliest memories are rooted in idyllic family holidays. Following the deaths of her parents, strange occurrences around the cove leave Lynch questioning how well she truly knows this place of slate that so irresistibly calls to her. Why has it become...

'Beth Lynch's subtle and moving book is about the heart-work of finding and making a place for oneself in the world; the effort of putting down roots, the pain of tearing them up again, and how one grows to know another person or another landscape. Horticulture and human feelings twine together here - and what flourishes in the several gardens of this book is, in the end, hope' ROBERT MACFARLANE'I loved Beth Lynch's tender, wise meditation on grief, home, a...

Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the most remarkable, significant and colourful figures in seventeenth-century England. Whilst there has been regular, if often cursory, scholarly interest in his activities as Licenser and Stuart apologist, this is the first sustained book-length study of the man for almost a century. L'Estrange's engagement on the Royalist side during the Civil war, and his energetic pamphleteering for the return of the King in the months preceding the Restoration e...

'Beth Lynch's subtle and moving book is about the heart-work of finding and making a place for oneself in the world; the effort of putting down roots, the pain of tearing them up again, and how one grows to know another person or another landscape. Horticulture and human feelings twine together here - and what flourishes in the several gardens of this book is, in the end, hope' ROBERT MACFARLANE'I loved Beth Lynch's tender, wise meditation on grief, home, a...

In her famous speech to rouse the English troops staking out Tilbury at the mouth of the Thames during the Spanish Armada's campaign, Queen Elizabeth I is said to have proclaimed, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king." Whether or not the transcription is accurate, the persistent attribution of this provocative statement to England's most studied and celebrated queen illustrates some of the contradictions and cultural anxieties that dom...

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human exist...

Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More is a masterful reconstruction of the life and imagination of one of the most remarkable figures of history. Thomas More (1478-1535) was a renowned statesman; the author of a political fantasy that gave a name to a literary genre and a worldview (Utopia); and, most famously, a Catholic martyr and saint.Born into the professional classes, Thomas More applied his formidable intellect and well-placed connections ...

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol an...

So many questions surround the key figures in the English literary canon, but most books focus on one aspect of an author's life or work, or limit themselves to a single critical approach. Geoffrey Chaucer offers: *basic information on an author's life, contexts and works *the major critical issues surrounding the author's works, from the time they were written to the present *explanations of the full range of different critical views and interpretations * guides to further reading in each...

English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century is an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, which can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This student Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, informs and illuminates the poetry by providing close reading of texts and an exploration of their background. There are individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbe...

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define ...

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domest...