Fear, Exclusion and Revolution Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s

Between the years 1677 and 1691 the Puritan minister Roger Morrice compiled an astonishingly detailed record of public affairs in Britain. Running to almost a million words his 'Entring Book' provides a unique record of late seventeenth-century political and religious history. It charts the rise of British party politics, and the transformation of Puritanism into 'Whiggery' and Dissent. It provides a wealth of information on social and cultural history, as well as the relationships between the three Stuart kingdoms. All the essays in this volume have been inspired by the key concerns of the Entring Book: the palpable sense of the fear and foreboding in the 1680s; the long shadow cast by the mid-century civil war; the profound effect on Englishmen of events on the continent; and the anxieties and opportunities caused by a socially diffuse culture of news and information. In so doing they give a vivid sense of what it was like to live in England in the years before the Revolution and help to explain why that Revolution took place when it did, and why it took the particular form that it did. These chapters provide fresh and insightful perspectives on religion, politics and culture from established and emerging scholars on three continents. Taken together they offer a valuable introduction to the world of Roger Morrice, and will be an essential companion to the scholarly edition of the Entring Book.

Contents: Introduction: Stabilizing and destabilizing Britain in the 1680s, Jason McElligott; Reformation and 'arbitrary government': London dissenters and James II's polity of toleration, 1687-88, Gary S. De Krey; Roger Morrice and the Huguenot refugees, Robin Gwynn; The politics of religious imagery in the late 17th century, Clare Haynes; L'Estrange and the publishing sphere, Geoff Kemp; London besieged? The city's vulnerability during the glorious revolution, Charles-Edouard Levillain; 'Eminent cheats': rogue narratives in the literature of the exclusion crisis, Kate Loveman; The 'prints' of the trials: the Nexus of politics, religion, law and information in late 17th-century England, Michael Mendle; Gilbert Burnet's Reformation and the semantics of popery, Andrew Starkie; 'High feeding and smart drinking': associating hedge-lane Lords in exclusion crisis London, Newton E. Key; Dissenters and the writing of history: Ralph Thoresby's 'lives and characters', David L. Wykes; Nursing sedition: women, dissent, and the Whig struggle, Melinda S. Zook; Judging partisan news and the language of interest, Mark Knights; Index.

Jason McElligott is the JPR Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early-Modern Printed Book at Merton College, UK.