Through its focus on the Continental reception of and engagement with seventeenth-century English thinkers and political events, this book offers new perspectives on English republicanism. Bringing together original essays by British and European scholars in the field of early modern intellectual history and English studies, the collection revises a one-sided approach to English republicanism and widens the scope of study beyond linguistic and national boundaries by looking at English republicans and their continental networks and legacy.
Dirk Wiemann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Along with a keen interest in postcolonial studies, his research focuses on the areas of seventeenth-century English republicanism and radicalism, emotion studies and contemporary representations of the English Civil War. His publications include Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008) and a number of articles on aspects of cultural politics in seventeenth-century England. Gaby Mahlberg is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Northumbria University, UK. She has previously taught at the University of East Anglia, Queen Mary College and Goldsmiths in the UK, and Humboldt University, Berlin and the University of Potsdam in Germany, and is author of Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game (Manchester University Press, 2009).
Contents: Introduction, Gaby Mahlberg and Dirk Wiemann; Part I English Republicanism and Continental Thought in the 1650s: Liberty for export: 'republicanism' in England 1500-1800, Blair Worden; Spectacles of astonishment: tragedy and the regicide in England and Germany, 1649-1663, Dirk Wiemann; Marchamont Nedham and the mystery of state, Rachel Foxley; Harrington, Grotius, and the Commonwealth of the Jews, 1656-1660, Marco Barducci; Irenic secularization and the Hebrew Republic in Harrington's Oceana, Mark Somos; Why the Dutch didn't read Harrington: Anglo-Dutch republican exchanges, c.1650-1670, Arthur Weststeijn; Popularizing government: democratic tendencies in Anglo-Dutch republicanism, Hans W. Blom. Part II The Wansleben Manuscript of Harrington's Works (1665): The Wansleben manuscript, Thérèse-Marie Jallais; Wansleben's Harrington, or 'The Fundations and Modell of a Perfect Commonwealth', Gaby Mahlberg; A 'republican' Englishman in Leghorn: Charles Longland, Stefano Villani; English Harringtonian republicanism in France and Italy: changing perspectives, Thérèse-Marie Jallais. Part III An English Republican Tradition in Europe?: The Harringtonian legacy in Britain and France, Rachel Hammersley; Lost in [French] translation: Sidney's elusive republicanism, Pierre Lurbe; Prussian republicanism? Friedrich Bucholz's reception of James Harrington, Iwan-Michelangelo D'Aprile; Bibliography; Index.