Esther S. Cope – författare

Eleanor Davies was one of the most prolific women writing in early seventeenth-century England. This volume includes 38 of the sixty-odd tracts that she published. Inspired to prophecy by a visionary experience in 1625, the year of Charles I's accession to the throne, she devoted herself to warning her contemporaries that the Day of Judgement was imminent. Her zeal and her intricately constructed tracts confounded contemporaries who called her mad. She experienced repeated imprisonment and also confinement to Bedlam, London's mental hospital. The tracts tell her own story as woman and prophet. They offer an opportunity to study her experiences as wife, mother, and widow; they also exhibit her extraordinary intellect, extensive education, and her fascination with words. In showing how England's history was fulfilling the biblical prophecies in the book of Daniel and Revelation, she commented about the political and religious controversies of the turbulent period preceding and during the Englsih Civil War and Revolution.

First published in 1987 Politics without Parliaments discusses the period 1629-40 which preceded the English Civil wars. It focuses on the responses of local leaders in the towns and counties to the personal rule of Charles I who dissolved parliament in 1629. It describes their reactions to his religious, military, and fiscal policies and the men and measures associated with him. Charles 's efforts to force the Scots accept the new prayerbook alarmed people in England and brought them to new levels of political activity which culminated in the petitions and protests of the summer of 1640. By late September Charles yielded to the pressure and announced that he would summon a parliament to meet in November.Based on extensive research in local records and family papers, this book provides a new and comprehensive understanding of responses to Charles I’s non parliamentary governments. Professor Cope concentrates on the country rather than the court and argues that throughout this period the local leaders did not forsake politics. This book provides students and scholars of seventeenth century history with new insights into the background to the English civil wars in the 1640s.