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This essay argues that climate change as a policy issue sits at the interface of several overlapping crises and must be understood within this broader context, which seems to parallel Gramsci's notion of the interregnum. In this context, competing coalitions not only contest the more visible policy problem (climate change) but also attempt to reshape governing institutions in alignment with their values. Rather than promote evidence-based policy making to rise above value conflicts; however, scholars should foreground values and the struggle over governing institutions. I argue for a focus on climate justice coalitions that do intersectional organizing across a range of social identities and thus offer potential counter-hegemonic projects that not only propose a way forward through the climate crisis but substantially focus on transforming the state to secure climate policy and more just governing institutions. I illustrate my argument with examples from climate justice coalitions in New York, USA and Meta, Colombia. I propose several possible areas of inquiry for interpretive and critical scholars related to this interregnum period and discuss the potential of action research as a mode of inquiry in this context and the challenges associated with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on commonwealth particularities extended to the word ‘critique' and its philosophical and political inheritance. Topics include encouraged by some readers not to use the word ‘critique' in the writing despite the fact that the thesis topic was ideology-critique in political theory; and no inherent relation in critical thinking, including the relation between critique and contradiction.

On 10 and 11 November 1673 Commonwealth's armies crushed Ottoman forces at the battle of Khotyn. Victory open new theatre of the operations against High Porte: towards river Danube and on the Polish territories lost in 1672 (Podolia with Kamianets-Podilskyi and Right-bank Ukraine). Polish and Lithuanian troops were very weary after the campaign, what's more death of King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki led to interregnum. Polish command decided to set up the system of border defence, to protect country until the election of new monarch, which should later lead to the new offensive. As such cavalry detachments were spread out in Podolia and Moldavia, while corps under command of Mikołaj Hieronim Sieniawski, Crown Standard-bearer was sent to occupy the latter country. Previous research mentioned that this group had between 6000 and 8000 soldiers. Thanks to document from National Library in Warsaw, we can now identify much more detailed organisation of Sieniawski's force. He had 48 pancerni banners and two light horse banners, in total 5206 horses. Despite capturing Iași, capitol of Moldavia, Sieniawski's troops were forced on 17 January 1674 to retreat to Poland, under pressure from the fresh Tatar attack. Despite of the withdrawal from Moldavia, border defence system was still functional and Commonwealth managed fairly quickly to elect new king. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores documentary records about the life and date of demise of Church of England clergyman Gilbert Coles in the 17th century. Topics discussed include the attitude demonstrated by Coles toward the educational system and policies during the Interregnum period in England, the arguments regarding the date of his death on his tombstone, and the confusion over the dates of the death of Coles and his son, Edward.

The memoirs of the parliamentarian lawyer and MP Bulstrode Whitelocke are invaluable as a primary source for historians wishing to understand the political history of the 1640s and 1650s. Yet, despite broad recognition of the contentious nature of this material, surprisingly little has been done to establish the accuracy of Whitelocke's account or to probe the motives behind the writing of his post-Restoration reflections. By focusing on Whitelocke's recollections of two famous encounters with Oliver Cromwell in 1651 and 1652, this article demonstrates that there is much in the detail of those accounts that fails to convince in the light of what is known of events and the author's activities from evidence beyond his memoirs. Rather, it seems that the accounts of these meetings were fabricated in order to obfuscate Whitelocke's activities during the Interregnum period and to propagate a series of narratives that served the author's purposes as he sought political rehabilitation after the Restoration of 1660. By failing to recognise the memory games at play in Whitelocke's work, historians have unwittingly embedded many of those same narratives in their accounts of the period, not least concerning the durability of the regime established in 1649 and Cromwell's kingly ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch prisoners from the sea battles of the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652-1654 were held in England under generally inhumane conditions. It has recently become accepted that ideological differences, as much as commercial, led to the deterioration in relations that led to the conflict. English public opinion had been inflamed by a vicious anti-Dutch propaganda campaign, suggesting that ideological demonization could provide the explanation for the dire treatment to which the prisoners were subjected. It is concluded, however, that logistical problems associated with their reception, plus the chronic lack of money of Cromwell's regime, provide a sufficient explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Izaak Walton first published his popular work The Compleat Angler in 1653. Charles I, the king of England, had been executed just four years earlier after almost a decade of civil war, and the king’s opponents had also abolished the Church of England. Long hailed as a primary inspiration for the modern conservation movement, most scholarship on the Angler has either ignored or muted the political context of Walton’s most famous book. However, the Angler is permeated with religious and political polemic. Revised multiple times before the author’s death, Walton amplified and extended his arguments in response to changes in law, politics, and religion. The present essay argues that when read alongside his other works and related literature published during these same years, the successive editions of Walton’s best seller emerge as one of the clearest, most consistent declarations of Anglican royalism in the mid-seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern historians of Persia's Safavid period (1501–1722) have long assumed that there was an interregnum between the death of Shah Ismāʿīl I in 1524 and the date when his son Ṭahmāsp came of age and established direct control in the 1530s. This idea of an interregnum takes two forms in the historiography. According to one narrative, during this time the Qizilbāsh amirs were disloyal to the young Ṭahmāsp and tried to seize control of Persia for themselves. According to the other, there was a war of succession in which Qizilbāsh factions supported different sons of Ismāʿīl I. Both of these narratives co-exist in the contemporary historical literature even though they disagree. Based on a close reading of the early Safavid chronicles, this article demonstrates that both narratives are incorrect and there was no interregnum. The Qizilbāsh continued throughout Ṭahmāsp's minority to respect him and treat him as their leader. Unsurprisingly, given his youth and inexperience, he deferred matters of state to his amirs. Nevertheless, his amirs derived their legitimacy to rule from him, and when leadership passed from one amir to another, it did so only with Ṭahmāsp's approval. Moreover, there was no dispute over the succession during Ṭahmāsp's minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the transformations in the area of State aid control prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and provides a first assessment on the European Commission Temporary Framework on State aid measures to support the economy. It discusses whether the measures adopted have been effective and have managed to guarantee Member States the possibility to take action as to ensure small undertakings affected by COVID 19 long-term liquidity and to preserve fair competition in what regards State aid rules control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1653, Cromwell's Nominated Assembly passed into law "An Act touching Marriages and the Registring thereof", which sought to reform and standardize English marriage laws by replacing the church ceremony with a simple civil service performed by a justice of the peace. Despite some regional successes, the Act was widely ignored and poorly enforced, and drew the ire of critics for its perceived hostility to traditional customs and institutions. In this paper I examine some of the nuptial-themed literature that responds both directly and indirectly to the 1653 marriage act, with a particular focus on the works of James Howell, whose varied output of work embodies the hopes, fears, and idiosyncrasies of Interregnum royalism. Not only does the work of Howell and his fellow royalists defend marriage against Cromwellian innovations, but more broadly, it illustrates how the discourse of marriage was uniquely suited to express cultural grievance and royalist solidarity during the early years of the Protectorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the theological writings of and contemporary responses to Sir. Henry Vane (1613–1662). An advocate for religious tolerance, Vane was a leading Parliamentarian during the English Civil Wars and worked closely alongside Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Vane once served on the Council of State that functioned as the government executive during the Interregnum but would clash with Cromwell over issues of governance. When Cromwell dissolved Parliament in 1653, Vane removed himself from power and retired to pen his theological utterances. By employing Vane's, The retired mans meditations, or, The mysterie and power of godliness (1655), I contend that the statesman's political theology positions Cromwell as the archetypal antichrist of the English Interregnum. Drawing on contemporary responses to Vane's theological writing, I also create a cross-sectional religious and intellectual history that illuminates Vane's theological position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the seventeenth-century prophetess Anna Trapnel's narrative of her domestic travel to Cornwall as a visionary text that combined the modes of travel and self-writing. It mentions Protestant emphasis on spiritual self-examination, surging during the political and religious instability of the Interregnum. It also mentions Trapnel's own visibility in the public eye relied on this very duality of print and public performance.

The article discusses the effect of King Charles III coronation in Australia. Topics discussed include that King Charles III is officially King of Australia, where it discussed that the coronation will have a large television audience as the country is culturally diverse; and that for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament and government the focus is for constitutional change in Australia.

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article explores the public ceremonies chosen to mark the restoration of Charles II in a range of provincial towns. It emphasizes both the extent of performative creativity and the prominence of martial forms at the proclamation in May 1660 and the coronation in April 1661. Using evidence from contemporary printed sources and the records of civic government, it demonstrates how local authorities could use public ritual to negotiate instabilities linked to the ‘Old Army’ of the commonwealth and the practical logistics of the new settlement while continuing to formulate more specific statements on the honour and security of the immediate vicinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The requirement to proclaim Richard Cromwell lord protector in September 1658 forced town leaders to engage with an unstable political context through the production of a large-scale public event. This article examines the ceremonies used in a range of provincial towns to offer a new perspective on urban culture in 1650s England. By analysing both contemporary print and the records of civic government, it reveals how urban inhabitants could maintain a variety of performative responses to state directive whilst approaching the moment of succession actively and pragmatically to confront issues specific to their respective locales. Crucially, there was no standard ritual experience and civic authorities remained relatively free to modify existing codes and apply them in the way/s that made most sense to their particular situation. In addition to confirming the essentially ambiguous nature of ceremonial expectation in this context, the findings presented in this article complicate our understanding of urban government during the last months of the protectorate by emphasizing the capacity for towns of varied religious and/or political complexion to use public ritual to further corporate interests and negotiate a range of specific concerns in both a national and a local framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is generally assumed that the kingless Commonwealth established in 1649 was the unforeseen consequence of the regicide: an expedient taken hesitantly and nothing more than a stop-gap. ‘Republicanism’ was a minority position even among those who remained at Westminster during the dramatic events of 1648–9: the majority remained committed to monarchical forms of government. By reappraising the surviving evidence, this article proposes a radically different account of the genesis of the Commonwealth regime. Not only were preparations already underway in the weeks before Charles I's death that helped to pave the way for government without a king, but also the decision to abolish kingship after the regicide was itself taken relatively quickly, with no discernible signs of hesitation. Even if few who defended or served the Commonwealth were republican, this need not mean that the majority were attached to monarchy. Rather, many of those who supported the regime, drawing upon the experiences and ideas of 1640s parliamentarianism, claimed that the form of government was only ever of secondary importance in comparison to its substance. They did not think kingship was inherently unlawful, but they did not believe it was absolutely necessary either. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the Civil Wars and Interregnum Parliament sought to fund its war effort by confiscating Royalist estates. The widows of Royalist landowners were left without a husband and without the prospect of any means of support unless they could regain those lands. These women petitioned Parliament alongside Royalist men in the interests of themselves and their families. They used emotive language of distress, sophisticated knowledge of their entitlement to inherited lands as well as accounts of their husband's actions and their own assertions of loyalty. The petitions of Royalist widows remind us that women throughout history had the capacity to respond to the realities and aftermath of war with tenacity and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all their differences, Scott’sThe Fortunes of NigelandThe Heart of Mid-Lothianhave distinct similarities. Each has a morally upright protagonist and is set some years after a Scottish-English union has been effected. More important is that each depicts a journey from Scotland to England in search of justice at the monarch’s hand and, inseparably from that, the establishing of a secure domestic space – the creation of a home – that emblematises the concept of successfully co-existent English and Scottish cultural identities. Both novels are thus specifically concerned with the achievement of justice in Scotland by the then-British monarch located in England.The Fortunes of Nigel, set in the reign of James I, considers the factors – personal, political, theological and social – arguably contributing to the overthrow of Charles I’s sovereignty and the establishment of the Interregnum.The Heart of Mid-Lothianconsiders questions of rebellion and societal injustice within the framework of the Hanoverian dynastic rule over Britain, after the English Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. In that context of political upheaval, what is of particular interest is therefore the exploration of what could be called the continuum between home and nation in the two novels: the experiences of an insecure domestic space and of an unstable national identity by members of two different social classes, in two different historical periods, under two different yet sequent monarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a highway robber James Hind -- the man with whom Charles II was thought to be hiding after his defeat in 1651 at the Battle of Worcester -- was said to be unparalleled, "an absolute Artist in his profession," as well as a courteous, Robinhoodish sort of criminal with a nimble wit, an aversion to bloodshed, and a habit of sharing his spoils with the poor. Or so he was conceived in cheap print. For James Hind became the subject of a spate of pamphlets and chapbooks after the royalist defeat at Worcester. They form a heterogeneous group, diverse in character, content, and genre, ranging from chapbook collections of short merry tales and news pamphlets to what many have termed the first criminal biography in English. For me, the Hind texts' interest lies in what they may suggest about the nature of royalism in the wake of the establishment of the Commonwealth regime and the failure of the royalist forces at Worcester. This article argues that the forces of social control with which the royalist Hind chapbooks and pamphlets contended were not one, but two. The first and more obvious powerful force was the Commonwealth regime, but the texts are also sites of a less-apparent second tension, one between a backward-looking, essentially feudal royalism and an emergent royalism marked by the same progressive populism that fueled the revolution. I propose, then, that the Hind pamphlets were popular in part because the highwayman offered readers a royalism associated with the humbler sorts of English men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the significance of an episode of monstrous birth in Fisherton Anger, Wiltshire, in 1664. Tracing the influence of natural philosophical, spiritual, and providential impulses in extant accounts of the Fisherton birth, it suggests that in order wholly to comprehend this material it is necessary to move beyond debates about the ‘rise of science’. It therefore explores the contemporary claims made about the Fisherton monster against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggesting that the rampant politicization of monstrosity after the outbreak of war in 1642 provides the key to understanding the emphasis on different kinds of natural, spiritual, and moral truth in accounts of physiological abnormality after 1660. A case-study of early Restoration efforts to negotiate the instability of past events, this article further argues that the impulse to forget which underpinned the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660) found different expression elsewhere in the form of censorship and beyond the political sphere in the field of natural philosophy. Considered in light of this early Restoration culture of amnesia, the Fisherton monster embodies a series of attempts to forget the passions of a turbulent political past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers detailed analysis of the patterns of book advertising in Marchamont Nedham's government-sponsored newsbook, Mercurius Politicus. It contends that, for a brief period, Politicus was the nearest thing that the mid-seventeenth century had to a literary periodical and contests standard accounts that Politicus was only successful because government monopoly made it so. Instead I show that Politicus was instrumental in creating an image of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as a Republic of Letters; the cheap print of its small advertisements insisted that the publication of a book was an event, that London was a city of the book, and that its inhabitants might respond to the uncertainty of political revolution by eagerly imagining a future comprised of new books as yet unread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1649, the newly created English commonwealth required that all men over the age of eighteen take an Engagement to demonstrate loyalty to the regime that had executed King Charles I. Historians have long argued that the Engagement was a political disaster for the commonwealth, as it provided its opponents with an opportunity to reveal the illegal and hypocritical nature of the new government. However, this article argues that the Engagement was actually a political success. Not only did people throughout England take the Engagement, but the royalists themselves acknowledged its achievement during the winter and spring of 1650. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines William Davenant's Interregnum drama, The Siege of Rhodes (1656), and its political and aesthetic interventions in debates about sovereignty and the emergent possibilities of English imperial power under Cromwell's Commonwealth government. Davenant's play, which dramatizes the imperial power of the Ottoman Turks against European forces in the Mediterranean, should be contextualized in relation to Cromwell's Western Design, a plan for foreign policy that sought to advance English colonialism in the West Indies. Although Davenant's play at first appears to support English expansionism, Davenant's language and stagecraft reveal the limits and contradictions of the desire for empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Blackstone's enormously influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (first published 1765-69, and never subsequently out of print) sought to provide an authoritative, coherent and comprehensive outline of'the elements of the law and the grounds of our civil 'polity'.While the Commentaries does not purport to be a work of history as such, Blackstone conceptualised his subject as a study in change over time. This paper explores his view of English history with special reference to the Civil War and Interregnum, and his claims to be taken more seriously as an historian than has hitherto been the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Independent minister Hugh Peter, chaplain to the New Model Army and close associate of Oliver Cromwell during the Interregnum, was a controversialfigure in the public affairs of mid-seventeenth-century England. His memory lingered long after his execution as a regicide in October 1660. Close investigation of how he was represented in print, manuscript, peformance, and speech sheds fresh light on the reinvention of antipuritanism during the Civil War and after the Restoration and on its metamorphosis into a broader concern about 'fanaticism'. It also illuminates the long and contested afterlife of the English Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines law and legal processes as legitimating languages of English state building and colonization in the 1650s. Particular focus is given to evidence drawn from the records of the Irish high court of justice. According to the author, law and legal processes were used to consolidate power and authority within the English empire. Topics discussed include English ruler Oliver Cromwell, anti-Catholicism, and common law.

Restoration secret histories about Charles II that used romance modes as their screening genre were not merely products of and contributors to the political factions taking shape in Restoration London; they also contributed to ideological changes regarding political subjecthood occurring in the late seventeenth century. By creating an affective link of intimacy between readers and the subject of their reading, in this case their monarch, secret history texts like Sébastien Brémond's Hattigé and the anonymous The Perplex'd Prince temporarily allowed for the subject to feel empowered to judge the behavior (personal and political) of the king. This affective intimacy created by secret histories was enabled by the social reading practices associated with this genre in the period. These reading practices created both real communities-in the coffeehouses and taverns of London-and imaginary communities of readers interested in the game of deciphering the texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Interregnum, English natural philosophers and chymists became deeply interested in Pierre Gassendi's revival of Epicurean atomism. In the English context, strategies to accommodate atomism to Christian doctrines were fraught with religious and political implications. English Roman Catholics differed from their Protestant compatriots in insisting that God did not cease to operate miracles at the close of the apostolic age. The English friar known as Franciscus à Sancta Clara embraced atomism on the grounds that a new and better science of material causes was indispensable for the accurate assessment of God's recent and future miracles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marchamont Nedham was one of the most significant English journalists of the seventeenth century. During the Interregnum, his newspaper Mercurius Politicus routinely printed stories of exiled royalists and their leader Charles Stuart. Although the topic of royalists was consistent throughout the 1650s, the royal image in Politicus was not. In the early 1650s, Nedham described Charles Stuart as a tyrant and enemy of freedom, while after 1651, the exiled king appeared as a failed monarch. Nedham's reporting of royalists was independent of government influence, and he himself elected to change his representation of royalists. It was the shifting political situation that convinced him to alter his descriptions of Charles Stuart and his followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a re-examination of the concept of Erastianism as an explanatory tool in discussions of church and state. It focuses in particular on three texts - by Pierre du Moulin, Thomas Cobbet and John Milton - that took up the question of the nature of civil power in the sphere of religion. Based on this, the article argues that the term ' Erastianism' obscures the complexity and nuance of arguments about religious politics in the civil war period. It concludes by suggesting that we should instead consider these debates as contributions to discourse on civil religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role that the army played in the censorship process and examines the pamphlets produced during the so-called "Beacon controversy" to prove that the newly formed state-censorship was the caused of a heated printed debate, which lasted for years. Topics discussed include the legal developments in censorship throughout the 16th and early 17th century, who controlled the print industry back then, and the censorship cases under the Cromwellian Protectorate.