On a winter night in 1743, a local magistrate was stabbed to death in the churchyard of Rye by an angry butcher. Why did this gruesome crime happen? What does it reveal about the political, economic, and cultural patterns that existed in this small English port town? To answer these questions, this fascinating book takes us back to the mid-sixteenth century, when religious and social tensions began to fragment the quiet town of Rye and led to witch hunts, riots, and violent political confrontations. Paul Monod examines events over the course of the next two centuries, tracing the town's transition as it moved from narrowly focused Reformation norms to the more expansive ideas of the emerging commercial society. In the process, relations among the town's inhabitants were fundamentally altered. The history of Rye mirrored that of the whole nation, and it gives us an intriguing new perspective on England in the early modern period.

The book discusses the 'state trial' as a legal process, a public spectacle, and a point of political conflict - a key part of how constitutional monarchy became constitutional. State trials provided some of the leading media events of later Stuart England. The more important of these trials attracted substantial public attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Later Stuart England has been known among legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries asserted their independence from judges. In political history, the government's sometimes shaky control over political trials in this period has long been taken as a sign of the waning power of the Crown. This book revisits the process by which the 'state trial' emerged as a legal proceeding, a public spectacle, a point of political conflict, and ultimately, a new literary genre. It investigates the trials as events, as texts, and as moments in the creation of historical memory. By the early nineteenth century, the publication and republication of accounts of the state trials had become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchs. This book explores how the later Stuart state trials helped to create that world.

Jacobitism, or support for the exiled Stuarts after the Revolution of 1688, has become a topic of great interest in recent years. Historians have debated its influence on Parliamentary politics, but none has yet attempted to explore its broader implications in English society. Paul Monod's study offers a wide-ranging analysis of every aspect of Jacobite activity, from pamphlets and newspapers to songs, cartoons, riots, seditious words, clubs and armed insurrection. It argues that Jacobitism was not confined to a tiny group of fanatical reactionaries, and that it had a profound impact on various aspects of English life, including political thought, literature, popular culture, religion and elite sociability. It contributed a great deal both to the emergence of conservative attitudes in eighteenth-century England and to the development of a radical critique of Whig government. This paradoxical legacy makes Jacobitism a subject of considerable and enduring significance in English political, social and cultural history.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. But in this illuminating book, Paul Monod reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new anti-establishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, finds Monod, the occult was not discarded in favour of reason but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.