This edition brings together for the first time key texts representing the writings of the medieval English mystics. The texts have been newly edited from early manuscripts, and are supplemented with textual and explanatory notes and a glossary. The book focuses on five major authors, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Dame Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. Shorter works are presented whole, where possible, and accompanied by extracts from the mystics' longer works; extracts from contemporary translations into English are also included to illustrate the reception of European mystical texts in later medieval England. Overall, this volume makes accessible some of the finest writing by English contemplatives and visionaries of the Middle Ages.

English critics were brilliant initiators and exploiters of biblical criticism. This momentous exercise, whereby the 'Holy Scriptures' became the object of human critique independent of church control, is illustrated by John Drury in the present volume with excerpts from such famous critics as Coleridge, Blake and Matthew Arnold, and lesser names such as Collins and Deist and Bishop Sherlock. Robert Lowth's famous lectures on the Psalms, which had an important influence on Blake and Christopher Smart, are well represented here, as is the famous contribution to Essays and Reviews by Benjamin Jowett. This book provides the only available collection of biblical criticism from this important period of critical enquiry, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extracts are accompanied by a full editorial introduction, notes and a bibliography. They should be read by all students of literature and theology interested in the period.

By the start of the Victorian period the school of British economists acknowledging Adam Smith as its master was in the ascendancy. 'Political Economy', a catch-all title which ignored the diversity of viewpoints to be found amongst the discipline's leading proponents, became associated in the popular mind with moral and political forces held to be uniquely conducive to the progress of an increasingly industrialised and competitive society. 'Political Economy' served in turn as the focus for critics of equally diverse moral and political persuasions, who sought to challenge the materialism of contemporary society and offer their own assessments of the profound social changes of the time. In the introductory essay to the collection of readings from such 'critics of capitalism', the editors review the principles of the early economists, the way in which these principles were appropriated and applied by their Victorian successors and the contrasting modes which critics of popular economic ideas assumed. Subsequent extracts from the writings of the Owenite Socialist John Bray, Carlyle, Marx and Engels, J. S. Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, T. H. Green, William Morris and G. B. Shaw, demonstrate both the breadth of the possible grounds for ideological opposition to the prevailing philosophy and the shifting nature of the debate as 'Political Economy' itself was revealed as incapable of explaining or responding to the changing conditions of the 1870s. Headnotes to the extracts describe the genesis of individual debate and discuss distinctive stylistic features. Annotation in the form of footnotes and endnotes has been designed to gloss obscure allusions and arguments. In making more accessible the socio-economic writings of those authors now better known for their imaginative work, this volume will enable readers to reach a more profound appreciation of the central role such work played in developing the moral vision embodied in their more lastingly popular books and essays.

Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to substantial selections from non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The series provides students, primarily though not exclusively those of English literature, with the opportunity of reading significant prose writers who, for a variety of reasons (not least their generally being unavailable in suitable editions) are rarely studied, but whose influence on their times was very considerable. This volume contains selections from nineteenth-century writers involved in the debate about the relation of science and religion. It centres on the Darwinian controversy, with extracts from The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man, and from opponents and supporters of Darwin. This controversy is placed in the wider context of the earlier debates on geology and evolution; the relation of science to Natural Theology; the effect of Biblical Criticism on the interpretation of Genesis; and the professionalisation of science by aggressively agnostic scientists.