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Hobbes's work had been associated with many features of political and cultural life in the early 1670s; atheism, libertinism, authoritarian churchmen and seditious dissenters. But as the crown appeared to drift towards what critics like Marvell would characterise as popery and arbitrary government, Charles's policies began to look more like the Hobbism condemned by Harrington and Lawson. Although Hobbes's absolutism had always been condemned, this feature of Hobbes's argument had drawn less attention in the early Restoration period. Partly this was because Hobbes had been successfully recast by Royalist propaganda as a seditious contract theorist, but a connected reason was that most parties had good reasons to magnify royal authority in a manner sometimes not unlike that described in Leviathan. Parliamentarians, Anglican churchmen and dissenters, for example, all sought royal support for their causes; if Eachard found nothing exceptional in chapters 18–20 of Leviathan, Marvell, as we have seen, could also appeal to Charles's absolute authority in a Hobbesian fashion as a possible means of bringing about a more moderate approach to dissent. As the decade wore on, however, the king's absolute authority started to seem less benign. The increasing (and to a large extent justified) suspicion that the court favoured popery and absolutist France began to motivate political opposition. The court's attachment to foreign arbitrary absolutism took centre-stage as a danger to law, property and religion. In this context, Leviathan's earlier reputation as the textbook of despotic absolutism could be fitted into more general anxieties about the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James II undoubtedly benefited at first from both the Hobbesian anxieties and attitudes generated in the first half of the 1680s. At the level of propaganda, the Tory view of Hobbes as the patron of sedition could be wheeled out to condemn opposition. In the thanksgiving sermons for the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor in July 1685, Henry Hesketh, preaching before the king, alluded to Leviathan as part and parcel of the republican consent theories that had motivated the rebels. More common were allusions to Hobbes's de factoism as a theory that had encouraged individuals to believe that they could seize the throne. John Goodricke preached to the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn that Mr Hobbes's state of nature ‘would justify all Wars, Rebellions, and unjust Invasions upon the Rights of Others’ and that his theory had been designed in the first place ‘to support an Olivarian Usurpation’. Thomas Wagstaffe similarly assaulted the thought ‘That every Man should enjoy the Benefit of Laws, and Society, and the King … should be in Hobs's State of Nature, and every Man had a Right to everything of His. And if a Man can but get together Men and Arms … he may lay Claim to the King's Crown and Dignity.’ But the condemnations again went hand in hand with the thought that the beckoning Hobbesian anarchy, however unnatural its genesis, required an authoritarian solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1700 the cumulative effect of five decades of critical engagement with Hobbes's writings had produced the images of the philosopher with which I began this book. Hobbes had attained a possibly unique position in the English imagination of the time. He had become a household name, but one associated with atheism, immorality, selfish behaviour, a poor view of human nature and unacceptable political views. Taken together these views constituted ‘Hobbism’, a well-documented creed to be detested by all God-fearing people and a set of views associated with a minority of ‘Hobbists’. These debased disciples fell broadly into two categories; the libertine and the hypocrite. The libertine, typically young, always immoral and often drunk, is a stock figure by the later seventeenth century, a lively combination of Scargill and Rochester. Robert Dixon captures him in his Canidia: The brave young Hobbist scorns and flies The Inns of Court and Universities, He vilifies the Man in Black, Makes the poor Curate drunk with Sack. In 1688 Jane Barker spots him with his friends up to no good, exemplifying the corruption of the town, when they: Kick Tavern Boys, and Orange-Wenches wooe, Are Machiavellians in a Coffee-house, And think it wit a poor Street-Whore to chouse; And for their Father Hobbs will talk so high, Rather than him they will their God deny … The other kind of Hobbist is the similarly irreligious but more calculating hypocrite whose superficial conformity to social norms and values conceals his adherence to the controversial philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disasters of plague, fire and war that affected England between 1665 and 1667 ushered in a new and potentially very dangerous period for Hobbes. They would also herald a new phase in the reception of Hobbes's work, one that would see an explosion of allusion to Hobbes and his works within popular culture, as well as the creation of the popular image of Hobbes as the archetypal atheist philosopher and Leviathan as the handbook of irreligion and amorality. If discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism had seemed to go into abeyance after the philosopher's struggles with his academic critics in the 1650s, the later 1660s undoubtedly saw a renaissance in critical discussion of Hobbes's work and a popular reconstitution of his public image in many different contexts. There were many connected reasons for the rise of Hobbesian discourse in the later 1660s, but there can be little doubt that it had an important relationship to the increasingly turbulent politics of the period. As earlier chapters have shown, the reception of Hobbes's work was often conditioned by the relationship between his ideas and the prevailing politics, and the situation in the later 1660s offers a complex example of this phenomenon. One factor central to the upsurge in Hobbesian discussion was the shift in the politics of the period. In the early Restoration period the basic alignment between crown, church and Parliament, fostered particularly by Clarendon and Sheldon, had allowed the suppression of the traditional centrifugal pressures that had traditionally plagued the Stuart polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period from 1660 to 1714 witnessed what might be called the birth of the modern English author. For it is during these years that there began to appear many of the features by which we define modern authorship: copyright legislation, widespread identification of the author on the title page, the ‘author by profession’, bookselling as a commercial enterprise, a literary ‘marketplace’, the periodical essay and political journalism. But it is important not to assume that the practice of authorship c. 1700 closely resembled the practice of authorship today, or even in 1800. Far from being an ‘independent’ man of letters, reflecting a highly individual sensibility, the typical author in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was enmeshed in an intricate web of social and political connections that not only defined a writer's working life but defined literary production itself. Most writing of the period was ‘occasional’ – prompted by some public event or controversy in the politics of church or state or the world of letters. Many writers in the early part of the period were aligned with a powerful courtier or minister – the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Rochester – or hoped to be, so that they could attract the attention and encouragement of a patron. Even at the end of the period many writers attached themselves to Whig and Tory ministers, Lord Somers, Robert Harley, or the Earl of Halifax. Even those who did not take part in high politics were enmeshed in dense private networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My subject is the conduct of reading at the close of the seventeenth century, but I want to draw an arc over habits of reading from Renaissance humanism to the mid-eighteenth century in order to set the late seventeenth century within a broad chronology and continuum of social practices and intellectual protocols. Such a context will help us to understand the formation and the long history of reading practices as well as the habits of particular moments. It will also suggest why the creation and prizing of opinion – the recognition and the critique of opinion as a sphere of social exchange – should emerge simultaneously, late in the seventeenth century, with the fashioning of increasingly passive consumers of texts. Charting the confluence of reading and opinion allows us to explore relations between the consumption and production of texts and ideas, perhaps even to explain how and why different spheres of mental activity get articulated together. Indeed, the creation and valorization of opinion might be seen as intimately tied to and dependent on a pacification and mechanization of humanist habits of reading. In The Battle of the Books Swift dramatized the contest between the ancients and the moderns, between learning and opinion, as armed conflict on the shelves of the royal library at St James's Palace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘This iron age departed, we behold, / An age of pleasure, luxury, and gold; / No more exist those opposites to Life, / A social husband, and domestic wife … / Triumphal entries and their dull parades, / Are chang'd for Op'ras, Balls and Masquerades; / No longer Sunday's dull employment cloys, / For Church we substitute politer joys …’ Thus in mildly satirical vein a poetaster of the 1770s described the smart new cultural world of Georgian Britain. The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated. As we shall see in this chapter, such changes do figure prominently in the dynamic, and increasingly pluralistic, cultural landscape of British cities during the Georgian era, but they were only part of the painting. In contrast to the earlier period, there can be little question that cities and towns after 1700 became vital centres for cultural mixing and dissemination, affecting not only the elite classes but a good part of national society as well. The leading cities, particularly London and Edinburgh, became cultural bazaars, increasingly cosmopolitan, importing and translating cultural ideas, goods and practices from continental Europe and beyond. Urban communities became exposition centres, exhibiting the fashionable models of cultural activity, whether performances of Handel's oratorios, meetings of a newly established learned society or the latest taste in furnishings, dress or speech. Yet British cities in the Georgian era were more than sites or stages for cultural exchange: they were also seedbeds of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: London in European perspective ‘London is the capital of England and so superior to other English towns that London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London, for England's most resplendent objects may be seen in and around London; so that he who sightsees London and the royal courts in its immediate vicinity may assert, without impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England.’ (Thomas Platter, Travels in England in 1599) London's growth was a phenomenon of European importance in our period. At the start, London was already a major capital city, ranking sixth in terms of size in mid-sixteenth-century Europe (see Table 10.1). It was dwarfed by the Italian city of Naples and was much smaller than either Venice (ranked second) or Paris (ranked third); and it was outnumbered by the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and London's principal trading partner, Antwerp. Within fifty years all this had changed. By 1600 London was ranked third in Europe after Naples and Paris, and its neighbour and erstwhile trading partner, Antwerp, was nowhere. Continued growth meant that London came second only to Paris by 1650 and by the end of the seventeenth century was the biggest European city containing some half a million people. London then developed from a modest capital city, with an economy largely dependent on the export of woollen cloth, to a metropolis at the heart of the European economy. Over our period its population spilled out from the original relatively densely populated districts of the City within and without the Walls (see Plate 1) to form an urban conurbation stretching from Wapping and Poplar in the east to Westminster in the west. Its economic impact on the nation expanded from the immediately adjacent counties to the entire nation, including its overseas colonies. The task of this chapter is to provide some idea of how this extraordinary growth was accomplished and what kind of economy and society it produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Towns in early modern Britain performed many commercial, manufacturing, service, legal, political and cultural functions, and these were unevenly distributed. Even capitals as dominant as London and Edinburgh did not contain all the activities found in their respective urban systems, and different towns performed varying combinations of functions, whose fortunes shaped significant restructurings of British urban systems over this period. Urban production and trade, and their regulation, involved townspeople acting in various local, regional and national contexts. Many facets of urban life were tightly intertwined with hinterlands, and interdependences of town and country were central to many urban economic sectors. While some historiographical tension persists between work focusing on contrasting features of urban and rural life, and work focusing on urban–rural (and urban–urban) connections, the foci are substantially complementary. Contrasts grew as connectivity increased, with growing spatial divisions of labour in economic, political, social or cultural activities. This chapter considers urban life, insofar as it was distinctive, through the specialised roles connecting towns with other places. We interpret ‘agrarian’ broadly, since rural economies were seldom solely agricultural. In comparative studies of European urbanisation, threshold populations of 5,000 or 10,000 have often been used, and for the demographic analysis of British towns this makes sense. But from an economic perspective very many much smaller places were unambiguously regarded as towns by contemporaries for whom functions, rather than population, provided ‘urban’ attributes. Sixteenth-century urban economic specialisations were less marked than later, but earlier commentators readily – if unsystematically – characterised towns by their specialised functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing home to the Doge and Senate, those crusty patricians ensconced in their colonnaded palace on St Mark's Square, Venetian ambassadors to the Tudor Court hymned the praises of London as one of the principal cities of Europe, but ignored or dismissed almost all the remaining English towns. Other sixteenth-century visitors from the great continental states were equally critical. Only travellers from the more remote central European countries found anything remarkable in English provincial towns. Scottish and Welsh towns barely figure in foreign reports: Edinburgh on one occasion was compared to a French country town. Yet by the late eighteenth century British towns – not just London but provincial towns – were the envy of the civilised world, admired in the many travellers' accounts which rehearsed details of their affluence, manufactures, vigorous club life, bustling, friendly shops, well-lit, orderly streets, and much else. Whereas at the start of our period only a minority of English people, maybe 15 per cent or so (and a much lower proportion in Scotland and Wales) resided in cities and towns, by the accession of Queen Victoria nearly half the British population was urban. Not only was there an increasingly integrated national system of towns, but British towns became notable as centres of economic and social innovation, of political discourse and cultural enlightenment, their advance having a growing impact on national society and beyond. Hitherto located on the European periphery in terms of urban development, analogous to regions like Scandinavia and central Europe with their low urban populations and localised towns, from the eighteenth century Britain emerged as the chief laboratory of a modernising world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the “usual work of women either to spin or knit, not to meddle with State Affairs,” observed a commentator in mid-seventeenth-century England. Echoing the point later in the century a writer inquired of his readers: “Do you not think Learning and Politicks become a Woman as ill as riding astride?” These two remarks, themselves typical of many others, express the prevailing view of women in politics in early modern England. This view (although sometimes contested) held that women were not supposed to have a public voice, much less a public political voice. Nonetheless, starting in the 1640s and lasting to the mid-eighteenth century when their voices faded and their public role receded, a growing number of middle- and lower middle-class women in England (as distinct from aristocratic women, who had long exercised private political influence) did “meddle with State Affairs.” Their “meddling” took various forms, none more important than that of printing their ideas on a variety of political, religious, administrative, social, and economic issues. For women the very act of using the printing press was of great significance. It was symbolic – a public defiance of traditional norms; in practical terms, it empowered women as nothing else had ever done, enabling them to make their ideas public, somewhat permanent, and available to a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will add, the little credit the Church of England has amongst the people; most men being almost as angry with that popery which is left amongst us (in surplices, copes, altars, cringings, bishops, ecclesiastical courts, and the whole hierarchy; besides an infinite number of useless, idle superstitious ceremonies; and the ignorance and viciousness of the clergy in general) as they are with those dogmas that are abolished. With the publication of The Miraculous Conformist in 1666, Stubbe resumed a polemical career in which he speaks with his old anticlerical ‘Hobbesist’ voice, though no longer freely but in a code full of cryptic meanings. We are now in a position to examine the principal sequence in his career as an early Restoration polemicist, his famous attacks on the Royal Society, delivered and published between 1669 and 1671. In these he defended Aristotle, Galen and Scholastic learning against the new philosophy of the Royal Society, as it was put forward by Thomas Sprat and Joseph Glanvill. The standard accounts of the controversy have interpreted him as a conservative defender of church and monarchy, wedded to the old Scholastic ‘humanism’ against the new scientific ‘naturalism’ and fighting a rearguard action against science and progress. Were this view correct, Stubbe would have had to make a considerable about-face between early 1666 and 1669 when the controversy began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the professoriate as a full-time career during the early years of the nineteenth century marked a signal change in the social organization of German intellectual life, which would have enormous consequences over the long term. In the first place, it would lead to the recruitment of students directly into the professorial ranks, creating in medical faculties a cadre of “physicians” whose attachment to the practice of medicine was uncertain. By mid-century, medical students like Carl Gegenbaur, Ernst Haeckel and Emil Du Bois-Reymond could take an M.D. without seriously intending to make a career as practitioners. Such career goals would have been virtually inconceivable in 1750, and were remarkable even in 1800. Secondly, these new professors would begin trading older forms of academic scholarship for the production of research more akin to our sense of the word: empirical discoveries meant to enrich the store of knowledge. While such research would eventually find its way into medical curricula, it was not conducted necessarily with pedagogical aims in mind, and much of what had once counted as scholarship in the eighteenth century (such as writing textbooks) no longer carried the same prestige. Of course, this is not to imply that empirical research had been unknown to eighteenth-century scholars, only to explain that the weight of research effort had shifted and that the environment for it – both institutional and cultural – had changed considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]