The Rule of Moderation

Ethan H. Shagan is Associate Professor of History and Director for the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002) which won numerous prizes including the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize and the American Historical Association's Morris Forkosch Prize, and is editor of Catholics and the 'Protestant Nation': Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (2005).

• Part I. Moderate Foundations: Introduction; 1. The bridle of moderation; Part II. Moderate Churches: 2. Violence and the via media in the reign of Henry VIII; 3. Conformist moderation; 4. Puritan moderation; Part III. Moderate Rule: 5. English expansion and the empire of moderation; 6. Social moderation and the governance of the middle sort; 7. Moderate freedom in the English Revolution; 8. Toleration became moderate in seventeenth-century England; Conclusion.

'This is a lively and provocative, but also deeply illuminating and richly suggestive work from one of the most original and stimulating historians currently working in the early modern period. Professor Shagan scores many a palpable hit in this wonderfully sustained critique of early modern historians' sloppy tendency to essentialize 'moderation' and 'moderate', and to misread these terms' relative, polemical function in the sources of the period. It should be required reading for all those working on early modern British history.' Anthony Milton, University of Sheffield