Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

This is a study of political word use in 17th-century England. A theoretical introduction re-characterizes intellectual history through language theory. Part one outlines the fugitive nature of 17th-century political discourse and the pressures making its vocabulary indiscriminate and susceptible to anachronistic reconstruction. Part two specifically charts the changing relationships between the words "subject", "citizen", "resistance" and "rebellion". Finally, attention is turned to the historian's own vocabulary and its misleading imposition on alien patterns of word use.