Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England

• Gerald Aylmer at Balliol, Christopher Hill; Gerald Aylmer in Manchester and York, Gordon Leff; Gerald Aylmer as a scholar, Austin Woolrych; cases of conscience in 17th-century England, Keith Thomas; public duty, conscience and women in early modern England, Patricia Crawford; private conscience and public duty in the writings of James VI and I, Kevin Sharpe; divine rights in the early 17th century; the conflicting loyalties of a "vulgar counsellor" - the third Earl of Southampton 1597-1624, Neil Cuddy; the public conscience of Henry Sherfield, Paul Slack; William Dowsing - the bureaucratic Puritan, John Morrill; a man of conscience in 17th-century urban politics - Alderman Hoyle of York, Claire Cross; the King's servants - conscience, principles and sacrifice in armed royalism, P.R. Newman; conscience, constancy and ambition in the career and writings of James Howell, Daniel Woolf; official members in the Commons 1660-1689 - a study in multiple loyalties, John Ferris; William Penn's odyssey - from child of light to absentee landlord, Richard S. Dunn; a select bibliography of the writings of G.E. Aylmer 1957-1990, William Sheils.

The theme chosen by the editors was broad enough to allow of many different interests and yet sufficiently precise to provide some common ground between them ... the research put into some of these essays has been prodigious.