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Religion has been increasingly reintegrated into the study of later seventeenth-century English politics. Nevertheless, historians of the later Stuart period have not displayed the same gusto for case studies of individuals’ careers as their colleagues working on the pre-civil war era. This article looks at the important role of religion within the career of Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester (1642-1711), a very significant but under-studied politician whose long career in public life stretched from the Restoration to the latter part of Anne’s reign. It is argued that a vital dimension of Hyde’s religious beliefs can be supplied by a detailed consideration of his family life. His father’s example, his sister’s conversion, a series of early deaths, and his relationships with his brother-in-law – James II – and nieces – Mary II and Anne – all combined to define Hyde’s public status. The interplay of these factors would lead to acute crisis in the winter of 1686/7, when his position as the protestant chief minister of a catholic king became untenable, and chronic discontent thereafter until his death in 1711. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book - a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a 'Chinese' style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though non-emergency private baptism became a debated issue in seventeenth-century England, the practice, as has been commonly believed, did not become a trend all over the country. By taking a close look at several seventeenth-century baptismal registers of churches in and outside London, this article shows that non-emergency private baptism was the choice taken mostly by well-to-do families living in London. As a contrast, rural parishes still adhered strictly to the Prayer Book, by administering private baptism only in emergency. Therefore, this article maintains that non-emergency private baptism was more of an exception than the common practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of defamatory and libelous popular literature in early modern British literature. It describes the influence of libels on popular culture in 17th century England, the seditious libel sent to the Earl of Rutland and the ways in which libelous literature encouraged or caused social unrest, and the psycho-sexual gender identities and stereotypes expressed in libels. Other subjects under discussion include the poetical aspects of libelous literature, the social relationship between British aristocracy and poor people, and the socio-economic class distinctions in the county of Lincolnshire.

Political arithmetic, generally understood as an early form of political economy, was originally designed by Sir William Petty in the 1670s less as a method of quantitative analysis than as a program of government through the direct manipulation of demographic processes. In the context of the English colonization of Ireland, its goal was “the transmutation of Irish into English”; under the Catholic James II it briefly became a program for the catholicization of the three Stuart kingdoms. Both projects undermined the national and religious categories associated with traditional exclusionist policy and fostered a radical inclusionism. Only after 1688 did Petty's successors decisively rearticulate political arithmetic as a putatively apolitical analytical tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the articles “Zion's people: who were the English nonconformists?” in 3 parts, "Gender, age and ethnicity," "Occupations (Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists)," and "Occupations (Methodists) and conclusions," by C. D. Field, which appeared in volume 40 of the periodical “Local Historian,” is presented.