This chapter challenges conventional and critically resilient scholarly periodization of theatre in which 1660 is seen as inaugurating innovative theatre practice. It demonstrates that the reframing of the drama by William Davenant and Richard Flecknoe during the 1650s left a legacy to the Restoration, a legacy that in texts of the 1660s Davenant and Flecknoe attempted to obviate. Theatre historians have been subsequently reluctant to acknowledge continuities in dramatic practice and theatre production. This chapter argues that the influence of the drama of the 1650s was wide-ranging. Reformed aesthetics, the scenic stage, the female performer, political satire and the representation of love and honour in new world contexts, all aspects of the production of Commonwealth drama, are variously reconstituted in plays of the Restoration stage.

This chapter examines Andrew Marvell’s transition from Republic to restored monarchy through his approach to manuscript circulation and print culture during this period. Mapping his output against Harold Love’s gradient of publication (where ‘strong’ implies a published text, and ‘weak’ implies anything less than private) presents a poet who took great care to limit the disclosure of his works. But Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’ presents a distinctive problem. Assumed to have been written in 1653 as part of a bid for preferment during the first Anglo-Dutch War, it may have remained completely private until an abridged version appeared anonymously in print in 1665. This chapter questions whether Marvell’s oft-disputed involvement with the abridged edition marks a carefully calculated return to print in a move of strategic opportunism.

In The Exceeding Riches of Grace, “Dinah the Black” is listed among the witnesses who can attest to the veracity of Henry Jessey’s account of Sarah Wight’s prophetic trances in the spring and summer of 1647. The designation “Dinah the Black” stands out in a list of persons of “esteeme amongst many that fear the Lord in London”, yet what is extraordinary about Dinah’s appearance is that it is not especially marked as extraordinary. This chapter takes Dinah’s appearance as indicative of the experience of black converts, arguing that her case marks some limits of acceptance into the godly communities of English visible saints. This chapter explores the valences of visibility and godliness, singularity and universality, race and religion as they informed or are illustrated by the practices of the English Protestant saints within the context of large-scale conversions of indigenous people in the East Indies.

This chapter opens by establishing women's centrality to the religious life of the household and community, and, in particular, their work as model converts and proselytisers. It argues that women’s devotion was neither inherently private nor inherently concerned with questions of selfhood or personal transformation. Drawing on the Queer Phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, the chapter suggests the extent to which conversion functions as a re-orientation and change in direction. The second half of the chapter takes women’s biblical needlework as a case study in material culture as an instrument of orientation. Considering a group of manuscript poems alongside the evidence of inventories and surviving stitchcraft, the authors argue for the evangelical and devotional effects of women’s decorative arts, and suggest that scriptural and religious themes were not simply emblematic but intended to work upon and transform the viewer. For early modern readers and viewers, the needle was a doubly efficacious tool, able to prick not only fabric but the consciences of those who wielded it or meditated upon its products.

After Titus Oates’s ‘popish forgeries’, which prompted a crisis in the succession, the production of Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was undoubtedly provocative. The play ostensibly celebrates the birth of a republic. This essay questions the conventional Whig reading of the play as one of republican heroism. As was the case with many anti-monarchical writings of the 1640s and 1650s, the play pivots on the distinction between ‘king’ and ‘tyrant’. But, in fact, Brutus expels the ‘name’ and retains the ‘thing’, the substance of kingship, investing his consulship with the power which was once Tarquin’s. Eventually he is seen as ‘more Tyrannical than any Tarquin’ (5.1.114). Nevertheless, the representation of Brutus apparently proved too subtle (or maybe too cryptic) an interpretation for contemporaries and the play was (safely) consigned to censure, lest it stir the bugbear of a new ‘Commonwealth without a king’.

In 1966 the author did a television interview with John McGahern, his first, not long after the publication of The Dark. The interview was directed by Tristram Powell and it was at his cousin's house, Pakenham Hall. Other work was done in Dublin and Howth, but the leatheracred library in that country pile in County Westmeath was where the conversation took place. Both Tristram and the author had been introduced to John's work and to John himself by the critic Julian Jebb, who had a gift for spotting fine new writers and an enthusiasm for sharing his pleasure in them. The author remember the faint glisten of imminent mildew in the stately library, the cavernous kitchens, the copy of a first edition of Decline and Fall hanging from a crude hook in a lavatory, inside which were the elegantly handwritten words and the cautious but confident presence of John.

The introduction explores existing scholarship on conversion and on the interrelationships between gender and religious experience in early modern Europe. It argues for the need to consider masculine as well as feminine modes of selfhood as malleable in the light of changing religious affiliations, and considers questions of performativity, language, materiality and orientation. Briefly outlining the contents of the collection as a whole, the introduction also points forward to important possibilities for further research and scholarship.

This chapter examines political prints that responded to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis (1679–82). It compares the political prints of the “Tory” Sir Roger L’Estrange, Licenser to the Press, with that of the “Whig” Stephen College, a “Protestant Joiner”. College was executed for his political cartoon, “A Ra-ree Show”, in 1682. This chapter uses these satirical engravings in order to contextualize the so-called “Tory Reaction” of 1681. It argues that one of the reasons why the Tories were so successful, by most accounts, in their efforts to discredit the Whigs has to do with the concept of loyalism. As the Whig agenda became increasingly tied to republican and non-conformist aims, their connection to loyalism began to dissolve. This made the Whigs vulnerable to challenges to their beliefs and practices both from without (by Tories) and from within (by the mainline elements from inside the Whig party itself).

John McGahern, in autobiographical writing and in interviews, articulates how the experience of learning came to shape his sensibility and very identity. From his early boyhood McGahern responded very sensitively to the world of nature and from his physical surroundings he derived a solace that sustained him throughout life. Although McGahern also came to love academic learning, especially literature, his primary schooling was very fragmented because his mother often had to change jobs. The chapter considers three themes from his experience as a student and teacher. These are his response to the instrumental role of schooling, his treatment of the social context in which schooling took place and his attitude to the teaching of Irish. McGahern's account of education offers in Memoir, relevant essays from the collection Love of the World and from published interviews, is a finely textured insight into the nature of the activities of learning and teaching.

In the new geo-political circumstances that developed in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and in particular the new prominence of a widely perceived antagonism between Islam and ‘the West’, conversion has once again taken a central role. The much vaunted ‘religious turn’ in early modern studies has followed in its wake, generating new perspectives on the complexities of post-Reformation devotional worlds and their interaction, work that is finding in conversion a means to better understand these worlds and our own. Moving between early modern and modern conversions, with a particular focus upon Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The abduction from the seraglio) as a transitional moment, this Afterword outlines the continuing urgency of the contributions collected in this volume in the context of contemporary debates.

This chapter suggests that drawing and poetry share the conceit of lines and their relation to the space of the page or ground. It begins with introducing the work of Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker in ecocritical context. The short poem, Tributaries, was written by the poet Tarlo, watching artist Tucker draw, very early on in collaborative place-based practice. The chapter presents the poem in relation to an image of a drawing, which is in turn, of course, an image of a place. It also presents case studies of two place-based creative projects based in northern England. They are Tributaries, close to home on Black Hill, near Holmfirth in the South Pennines, and Excavations and Estuaries, located a little further away, on the estuarial coastline and Fitties Holiday Park, Cleethorpes.

The lives, and political thought, of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes, were closely interwoven. In many ways opposed, their views on the relationship between Church and State have often been seen as less far apart, with Clarendon sharing Hobbes’s Erastianism and concerns about clerical assertiveness in the 1660s. But Clarendon’s writings on Church-State relations during the 1670s provide little evidence of concern about clerical involvement in politics, and demonstrate his vigorous adherence to a fairly conventional view among early seventeenth-century churchmen about the proper boundaries to royal interference in the Church; his worries about attempts to push further the implications of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs are evident in his writings against Hobbes, as are his even greater anxieties, exacerbated by the conversion of his daughter, the Duchess of York, about the dangers of Roman Catholic encroachment.