Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War

The English Civil War was not simply a conflict between two opposing, unstable, complicated alliances of various factions, but a war of words. Supporters of the King and allies of Parliament and the New Model Army clashed over ideals, ideas, and concepts as they each sought to impose their understanding of history and visions of the future, realizing that victory could only be secured by establishing a political and cultural language that would guide and direct those who used it. Accordingly, the Civil War witnessed vociferous arguments over many key English words central to life and thought in the seventeenth century, and often up to the present day. Words at War seeks to bring together scholars of literature, history, religion, and philosophy to analyse the ways in which key terms were deployed and debated in the Civil War and Commonwealth. In doing so it refocuses attention on ideas and concepts that shaped the modern world well beyond the bloody conflict on the battlefield.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British Academy and the English Association. His books include Shakespeare and Republicanism; Edmund Spenser: A Life; Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance; Literature and Class: From the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution; John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion; and Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing.


Paul Hammond is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome; Milton and the People; Milton's Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of 'Paradise Lost'; and Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire. He is co-editor of The Poems of John Dryden, Five Volumes and editor-in-chief of a new Longman Annotated English Poets edition of The Complete Poems of John Milton.