‘CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM’

The concept of ‘classical republicanism’ was developed to explain something about the relationship between seventeenth-century English literature and politics. Zera Fink's The Classical Republicans was the work of an American scholar of Wordsworth and Milton who came, through his interest in the latter, to identify a group of writers whose work was influenced by classical sources and political examples. This may now seem unremarkable, amounting to little more than the claim that seventeenth-century English republicans were humanists. Yet, as we have needed recent reminders that the era of Reformation, and Counter-Reformation, did not end in the sixteenth century, so recent scholarship, not least of English literature, has returned to underline contemporary claims both that seventeenth-century England remained a renaissance culture, and that this fact had important political implications.