Political Culture, the State, and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625

R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he taught between 1976 and 2012 after receiving his PhD from Princeton University. A specialist in early modern politics and political culture with strong interdisciplinary interests, he is the author of Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987), Culture and Power in England, 1585-1685 (1998) and numerous articles. He has also edited The Oxford Companion to the Age of Shakespeare (2016) and The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays on Politics and Political Culture (1996), and co-edited with Luc Duerloo The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth Century Europe (2016).

• Introduction 1: Religion, Dynastic Politics, and Public Discourse: The Anjou Match and its Contexts 2: The Containment of English Catholicism 3: An Ambiguous Dynastic Threat: James VI and Scotland to 1589 4: Entrepreneurial Violence and the Protestant State 5: Defending the State in Ireland 6: The Earl of Leicester, the Protestant Cause, and the Failure of English State Building in the Netherlands 7: War, Virtue, and the State: Political Culture and the Essex Circle 8: The Battle over Erastian Episcopacy in Two British Kingdoms, 1587-1603 9: King James's Peace, the Laws of the Realms, and the Forging of a United Kingdom? 10: The Stuart State and its Peripheries 11: Peace Without: The European Policies of James I 12: Dynastic Politics, Confessional Polarization, and the Challenge of New Religious Wars 13: The Problem of Religious War and the Structure of Politics at the Accession of Charles I

In this massive, ambitious book, Smuts aims to expand the narrative of early modern British political history...Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.