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The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen in early modern England, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity. It considers the practices that constituted urban citizenship as well as its impact on the economic, patriarchal and religious life of towns and the larger commonwealth. The author has recovered the language and concepts used at the time, whether by eminent citizens like Andrew Marvell or more humble tradesmen and craftsmen. Unprecedented in terms of the range of its sources and freshness of its approach, the book reveals a dimension of early modern culture that has major implications for how we understand the English state, economy and 'public sphere'; the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth-century and popular political participation more generally

AbstractIn 1600 the word 'consumption' was a term of medical pathology describing the 'wasting, petrification of things'. By 1700 it was also a term of economic discourse: 'In commodities, the value rises as its quantity is less and vent greater, which depends upon it being preferred in its consumption'. The article traces the emergence of this key category of economic analysis to debates over the economy in the 1620s and subsequent disputes over the excise tax, showing how 'consumption' was an early term in the developing lexicon of political economy. In so doing the article demonstrates the important role of 'intoxicants'—that is, addictive and intoxicating commodities like alcohols and tobaccos—in shaping these early meanings and uses of 'consumption'. It outlines the discursive importance of intoxicants, both as the foci for discussions of 'superfluous' and 'necessary' consumption and the target of legislation on consumption. It argues that while these discussions had an ideological dimension, or dimensions, they were also responses to material increases in the volume and diversity of intoxicants in early seventeenth‐century England. By way of conclusion the article suggests the significance of the Low Countries as a point of reference for English writers, as well as a more capacious and semantically sensitive approach to changes in early modern consumption practices.

"Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance, attracting enormous amount of critical attention since its first publication in Latin in 1516. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays by experts in their respective fields brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about More's book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its utopian legacies, and its vernacular translations. Each chapter provides a fresh and accessible contribution to established and ongoing debates about More's book, making for an integrated approach to its genesis, vernacularisation, and afterlives that will appeal to academics, students, and general readers. Especially innovative is how the Handbook allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The editors provide a full introduction plus an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text"--