Ann Hughes

The world is full of all kinds of people. Each with their own particular statement to the world. Some people are humorous, some inspiring, some are infuriating and others are heartbreaking. Each paints a picture of themselves by the way they express who they are to the world. Some have moved me to write poems about them.

This important collection of essays, based on extensive original research, presents a vigorous critique of ` revisionist' analyses of the period, and reasserts the importance of long term ideological and social developments in causing the outbreak of the civil war.

In this fascinating and unique study, Ann Hughes examines how the experience of civil war in seventeenth-century England affected the roles of women and men in politics and society; and how conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity were called into question by the war and the trial and execution of an anointed King. Ann Hughes combines discussion of the activities of women in the religious and political upheavals of the revolution, with a pioneering analysis of how male political identities were fractured by civil war. Traditional parallels and analogies between marriage, the family and the state were shaken, and rival understandings of sexuality, manliness, effeminacy and womanliness were deployed in political debate. In a historiography dominated by military or political approaches, Gender and the English Revolution reveals the importance of gender in understanding the events in England during the 1640s and 1650s. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in women’s history, feminism, gender or British History.

In this fascinating and unique study, Ann Hughes examines how the experience of civil war in seventeenth-century England affected the roles of women and men in politics and society; and how conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity were called into question by the war and the trial and execution of an anointed King. Ann Hughes combines discussion of the activities of women in the religious and political upheavals of the revolution, with a pioneering analysis of how male political identities were fractured by civil war. Traditional parallels and analogies between marriage, the family and the state were shaken, and rival understandings of sexuality, manliness, effeminacy and womanliness were deployed in political debate. In a historiography dominated by military or political approaches, Gender and the English Revolution reveals the importance of gender in understanding the events in England during the 1640s and 1650s. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in women’s history, feminism, gender or British History.

This is the first comprehensive study of Gangraena, an intemperate anti-sectarian polemic written by a London Presbyterian Thomas Edwards and published in three parts in 1646. These books, which bitterly opposed any moves to religious toleration, were the most notorious and widely debated texts in a Revolution in which print was crucial to political moblization. They have been equally important to later scholars who have continued the lively debate over the value of Gangraena as a source for the ideas and movements its author condemned. This study includes a thorough assessment of the usefulness of Edwards's work as a historical source, but goes beyond this to provide a wide-ranging discussion of the importance of Gangraena in its own right as a lively work of propaganda, crucial to Presbyterian campaigning in the mid-1640s. Contemporary and later readings of this complex text are traced through a variety of methods, literary and historical, with discussions of printed responses, annotations and citation. Hughes's work thus provides a vivid and convincing picture of revolutionary London and a reappraisal of the nature of 1640s Presbyterianism, too often dismissed as conservative. Drawing on the newer histories of the book and of reading, Hughes explores the influence of Edwards's distasteful but compelling book.

This book discusses the origins, impact and aftermath of the Civil War in Warwickshire, examining administration, religion and politics in their social context. The focus is mainly on the landed élite, but the importance of relationships between members of the élite and their social inferiors is also stressed. Early chapters discuss the economic and social character of Warwickshire; a middle section examines the onset of the Civil War in 1642; and finally there is a discussion of the economic impact of the war and the administrative, political and religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s, culminating in an assessment of the significance of the Restoration. Dr Hughes takes a critical approach to recent historiography, and challenges the concept of a ‘county community’. The book is intended as a contribution to a general understanding of the Civil War, rather than as a study of one particular county.