Political Culture, the State, and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625

In the period between 1575 and 1625, civic peace in England, Scotland, and Ireland was persistently threatened by various kinds of religiously inspired violence, involving conspiracies, rebellions, and foreign invasions. Religious divisions divided local communities in all three kingdoms, but they also impacted relations between the nations, and in the broader European continent. The challenges posed by actual or potential religious violence gave rise to complex responses, including efforts to impose religious uniformity through preaching campaigns and regulation of national churches; an expanded use of the press as a medium of religious and political propaganda; improved government surveillance; the selective incarceration of English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics; and a variety of diplomatic and military initiatives, undertaken not only by royal governments but also by private individuals.

The result was the development of more robust and resilient, although still vulnerable, states in all three kingdoms and, after the dynastic union of Britain in 1603, an effort to create a single state incorporating all of them. R. Malcolm Smuts traces the story of how this happened by moving beyond frameworks of national and institutional history, to understand the ebb and flow of events and processes of religious and political change across frontiers. The study pays close attention to interactions between the political, cultural, intellectual, ecclesiastical, military, and diplomatic dimensions of its subject. A final chapter explores how and why provisional solutions to the problem of violent, religiously inflected conflict collapsed in the reign of Charles I.

R. Malcolm Smuts, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston

R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he taught between 1976 and 2012 after receiving his PhD from Princeton University. A specialist in early modern politics and political culture with strong interdisciplinary interests, he is the author of Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987), Culture and Power in England, 1585-1685 (1998) and numerous articles. He has also edited The Oxford Companion to the Age of Shakespeare (2016) and The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays on Politics and Political Culture (1996), and co-edited with Luc Duerloo The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth Century Europe (2016).