New Releases by David Womersley

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

The short, action-packed reign of James II (1685-88) is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history. James managed, despite having access to tremendous reserves of good will and deference, to so alienate his supporters that he had to flee for his life. And yet, most of that life was spent not as king but first as heir to Charles II, as Duke of York (after whom New York is named) and then in the last part of his life as the first Jacobite ''Pretender'', starting a problem that would haunt Britain''s rulers for generations.

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.

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.

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.

In the summer of 1994, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Gibbon''s death, a group of scholars gathered in Oxford to commemorate and explore his achievement, producing this volume of essays. Eighteen years earlier, in 1976, there were similar gatherings for the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of The Decline and fall, likewise producing published collections of essays. Comparing the present volume with its predecessors, how has scholarship devoted to Gibbon changed in the intervening years?The dominant theme of Gibbon studies during this recent period has been ''disaggregation'', and this can be understood in two senses. Firstly, there has been textual disaggregation. Works which earlier scholars were content to treat as ''un ensemble'' are today scrupulously delaminated: manuscripts are compared, different editions collated, separate instalments discriminated, successive drafts juxtaposed. It seems safe to say that no modern study of Gibbon could gain a hearing unless its author was evidently a master of the relevant textual bibliography. The result of this renewed interest in bibliography has been a much sharper awareness of the complexity of Gibbon''s writings as literary artefacts. Secondly, disaggregation has also occurred in the contexts, both English and European, within which Gibbon''s work demand to be read. The Enlightenment itself is now apprehended as a congeries of movements and events that attracted men of divergent aims and beliefs. In this freshly complicated setting, Gibbon''s life and work emerge as key points, through which swirled many of the most important intellectual currents of the day. The essays collected in this volume exemplify and extend these trends in Gibbon scholarship. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780729405522?cc=us