New Releases by David Womersley

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that ‘the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’, something had changed. David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume’s division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings. Volume 2 is published simultaneously.

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that ‘the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’, something had changed. David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume’s division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings. Volume 1 is published simultaneously.

"An authoritative edition of the most important late seventeenth and early eighteenth century pamphlets on the "Standing Armies" controversy"--

''James was a king tragically trapped by principle. Yet was it wise to attempt to change the national religion?'' The short reign of James II is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history, ending in his exile after he unsuccessfully tried to convert England to Catholicism, a crisis that would haunt the monarchy for generations. Ultimately, David Womersley''s biography shows, James was a man whose blindness to subtlety and political reality brought about his ruinous downfall.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ''certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred''. How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s. Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare''s history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare''s career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare''s later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

The two plays presented in full in this volume – Wycherley''s The Country Wife and Congreve''s The Way of the World – illustrate the evolution of Restoration comedy between 1675 and 1700. Includes full texts of Wycherley''s The Country Wife and Congreve''s The Way of the World. Demonstrates how Restoration comedy evolved between 1675 and 1700. Introduces general readers or students to the genre. An editorial introduction guides readers through the plays and the period.

The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifications of an elusive aspect of authorship. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, Womersley makes possible a more intimate understanding of what might be called Gibbon''s experience of himself. At the same time he deepens our knowledge of the conditions of English authorship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

David Womersley''s book investigates Edward Gibbon''s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work''s transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon''s achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.