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This introductory chapter sets out the basic ideas that motivate the book. First, science in the West from the early modern era onwards has developed in a very distinctive way that distinguishes it from earlier forms of scientific activity, which had traditionally exhibited a pattern of slow, irregular, intermittent growth that alternated with substantial periods of stagnation. Second, the emergence of a scientific culture reveals that the distinctive features of scientific culture are not sui generis, something to be elucidated merely through reflection on the supposed nature of science. Rather, they have arisen as a result of specific and contingent challenges that have emerged since the 17th century, challenges which are generated in an intellectual culture that goes beyond developments internal to particular scientific programmes. Third, this distinctiveness of Western scientific practice and its cultural and cognitive standing derives in large part from the legitimatory aspirations that it takes on in the course of the 17th century.

In the century after 1563, the world of the copyholders of the manor of Whickham was utterly transformed by industrial development. Long before the mid-seventeenth century, however, most of the inhabitants of Whickham were not copyholders, and never had been. While one outstanding social consequence of industrial growth had been the dissolution of the agrarian community of the sixteenth century, there are two others that also demand attention: the emergence of a new industrial population, and the creation of a new social structure. Both of these processes were in train by the turn of the sixteenth century and they proceeded alongside, and were influenced by, the struggles of the copyholders to adapt to the dynamic of economic change. It is only in the 1660s, however, that we are able to take stock of these developments in the parish as a whole – the opportunity being provided by the hearth-tax returns of the Restoration era. This chapter presents an anatomy of the population of the parish in the reign of Charles II – a population that had emerged in the course of three generations of drastic change and which lived, in William Gray's telling phrase, ‘by the benefit of coals’.

This introduction is a summary of the themes of this book, which is a collection of previously published essays on the problem of causation in seventeenth-century philosophy. In particular, these essays consider the various philosophical, theological, scientific, and historical aspects of occasionalism and the variations of that doctrine found among Cartesian philosophers.

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter re-examines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by surveying the comparative history of identity registration systems among the British overseas in the early modern period. A review of the variety of measures for registration set up in the North American and Caribbean colonies during the course of the seventeenth century confirms the importance of the security of property-holding in an increasingly commercial world as a motive for creating such systems. However, this review also indicates the importance of whether or not effective social security systems, giving entitlements to relief, accompanied these early identity registration schemes.

Sources such as diaries, letters and inventories suggest that certain places were preferred for music-making during the seventeenth century: the great chamber for eating and dancing, the chamber and the cabinet for private concerts, and the gallery for great occasions. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the ballroom appears in some beautiful castles and town mansions, equipped with a balcony all around or a small loft to house musicians. During the same period, some people had a cabinet devoted to music. It is only during the second half of the century that we find precise terms such as ‘chamber for music’ at Chenonceau Castle or ‘music room’ as it appears in the well-known Parisian mansion of the duchesse de Guise. This evolution is naturally symptomatic of both the royal examples and the creation of multiple social circles, the so-called ‘salons’.

This chapter investigates the locations and modes of musical performance in the residences of the nobility in seventeenth-century Rome, indicating the differences between this period and the Renaissance. In particular, instances of music-making in the courts of princes and cardinals are identified and described, in relation to considerations of etiquette, social conventions and anthropology. This research, based on first-hand documentary research in the archives of Roman noble families, has revealed unexpected locations for music-making, which cannot always be justified in terms of acoustic or aesthetic criteria. Particular attention is paid to the places where instruments were stored, as recorded in inventories, and their typology.

Puritan teaching and practice during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed a matrix within which spiritual autobiography would eventually flourish in England. Puritan pastoral theology, such as that of William Perkins, taught that the first use of the law was to intensify the pangs of introspective conscience on the part of the unregenerate, in fact to lead them to despair, and the crisis this induced was the centre of all the various ‘morphologies’ of conversion that appeared during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries among Puritans, Pietists, and evangelicals of various sorts. This theology was reflected first in diaries and then in the full expression of narrative identity, the self-interpretation of the entirety of one’s life in terms of conversion. While Richard Kilby offers an early example of Puritan spiritual autobiography, the formal occasion for oral narrative appeared in the requirement of the gathered churches for evidence of personal conversion, a requirement that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century and then became widely adopted. Still, throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, a special motive to publish spiritual autobiography was required—especially specimens from ordinary folk without any social standing—and this motive was most often found in the need to defend oneself or the sense that the times were epochal or indeed apocalyptic.

The origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries present special difficulties because no empire, as the term subsequently came to be understood, then existed, while the adjective ‘British’ meant little to most inhabitants of Britain and Ireland during the years covered by this book. During the sixteenth century, England was sometimes described as an empire, but always with a view to emphasizing the long tradition of independence from foreign potentates, including the Pope, enjoyed by its monarchs through the centuries. John Oldmixon concluded in 1708 that ‘the British Colonies are or maybe much more advantageous to the Britains than the Roman Colonies…were to the Romans’. This book sets out to demonstrate that the unfolding of the trial-and-error efforts of the subjects of the British Crown through the course of the seventeenth century can indeed be considered the origins of empire.

From antiquity, to the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and to the early modern period, a genre of poetry flourished in the West that has fallen out of favour in the recent times. This is didactic poetry, poetry of instruction in astronomy, hunting, farming, philosophy, and in all fields of sciences, arts, and recreational activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits produced a great quantity of Latin didactic poems. These poems revealed of the early modern Jesuits, local literary fashions, classical traditions, contemporary events and inventions, scientific developments, cultural knowledge, and social mores. Didactic poetry was the best literary genre for the cultivation of the Jesuits, the modern teaching order par excellence. The majority of Jesuit didactic poems were written by teachers, most of whom were writing in a radically transformed world of print and science, and in the scholarly language of Latin that was facing its gradual decline in the eighteenth century. Most of these poems were initially written for their fellow Jesuits and not for the proper literary classes of humanities and rhetoric. By the turn of the eighteenth century, didactic poems began to take a special place among the Jesuits, and a consciousness of contributions to the Jesuit tradition and microtradition ensued wherein the didactic poems took a special part.

In seventeenth-century Puritanism, on both sides of the Atlantic, the importance of stirring and channeling holy desire was central to the spirituality inherited from John Calvin. The Puritans identified two “Schools of Desire” that were able to allure and instruct the hearts of believers in nurturing a passion for God. These included Nature's beauty, functioning as a “second book” alongside the Scriptures, and the ordinance of Marriage, modeling the believer's relationship to Christ as lover and bridegroom. In the process of attending to these “schools,” the Puritans were drawn to a compassion for creatures in the natural world as well as to a passionate delight in their spouses.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an ancient pattern of long-distance trade between Asia and Europe grew greatly in scale. The demand for Asian imports, especially in western Europe, grew with increased purchasing power among certain sections of the population. New supplies of bullion from America gave European merchants the means with which to buy more Asian goods. The opening up of the route round the Cape of Good Hope enabled an ever-increasing volume of Asian goods to be transported to Europe at reduced cost and with a reasonable reliability. Finally, commercial organizations evolved which proved themselves capable of effectively transacting trade on a large scale over great distances. The English East India Company was one of these organizations. At the end of the seventeenth century, it was set to become the most successful of the European traders operating in Asia.

It is a commonplace of the historiography of early modern England that the national government was weak. Lacking a bureaucracy and armed forces, and the financial means with which to acquire these things, it delegated responsibilities to subordinate bodies. This was even more striking in relation to government activity further afield. During the seventeenth century the ‘overseas activities’ of government — trade, war, and settlement — were undertaken by means of an administrative repertoire of delegation and ‘government by licence’. On the other hand, both at home and overseas, the seventeenth century saw an increasing amount of administrative activity taken on more directly by national government. This chapter examines the increasingly direct responsibility for war, trade, and colonization assumed by the national government and considers issues relating to ‘Imperial policy’ only in this more general context.

This is an examination of the reception of Calvin's thought in the works of seventeenth century Calvinist theologians. The chapter focuses on four ways in which Calvin's work was received: (1) the identity of Calvin and the character of his work, (2) referencing Calvin's Institutes and Commentaries, (3) theological uses of Calvin's work‐positive and polemical, (4) citation and use of Calvin by Herman Witsius and François Turrettini. The variety of ways in which Calvin's theology was cited and used shows that he was generally respected but not always followed, as theological Calvinism assumed a wide variety of shapes.

After centuries of conquest and expansion, the Ottoman Empire descended into crisis in the 1590s as a widespread uprising known as the Celali Rebellion ushered in decades of economic dislocation, military setbacks, and flight and chaos in the countryside. This chapter offers a fundamental reinterpretation of this social unrest, combining original archival research with new data and perspectives from climatology to present the crisis as a critical conjuncture of ecological pressures and deteriorating climate brought on by the Little Ice Age. Already by the 1580s, rapid population growth had placed the empire's elaborate provisioning systems under stress. As the Ottomans fell into a grueling war with the Habsburgs in 1593, the Eastern Mediterranean also descended into its worst drought in six centuries, punctuated by the coldest winters in memory. A widespread epizootic proved fatal to imperial stability, as unbearable wartime requisitions combined with famine and desperation to foment rebellion. The depopulation of the countryside and the nomadic invasions that followed unraveled centuries of settlement and demographic expansion. This chapter thus illustrates some of the major environmental forces at work in the Ottoman Middle East and the power of environmental history to reinterpret the region's past.

The thousands of English settlers who flocked to the north-eastern coastline of the continent of North America during the early seventeenth century established a flourishing society which so closely resembled that of the mother country that it alone, of the many English outposts erected on the far side of the Atlantic, could reasonably be known as New England. Although New England's town-based settlement, diversified economy, and family labour system corresponded broadly to English patterns, colonial society differed in important ways. New Englanders interacted — sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently — with Indian peoples. The established Puritan religion of all New England colonies except Rhode Island constituted religious dissent in England, where for much of the century its adherents were subject to persecution and legal disabilities. The availability of land in New England gave its inhabitants a degree of economic independence that Englishmen could only envy.

This chapter investigates the seventeenth-century cultural and historical context of Milton's portrayal the relationship of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. This approach aims to bring the intellectual, doctrinal, and political debates with which he engaged in his portrayal of the relationship between the sexes. The chapter examines Milton' understanding of the ideas of woman, womanhood, and the cultural debates about the relationship of man and woman in marriage and in the household, and the ways in which these conceptions formed his political and theological outlook. Milton's thoughts on gender and marriage, which were grounded in reformation and seventeenth-century Puritan teachings, in political debates on family and political obligation, and in the ideological and imaginative relationships between politics and gender, formed his prose and poetry on the relationship of man and woman.