During the revolutionary decade of the 1640s Thomas Collier emerged from his native Somerset to become a significant Particular Baptist leader. He produced more than a score of books and established numerous churches. Collier was a well-known controversialist who debated opponents on subjects such as baptism and the ordination of lay preachers. Collier's theology was worked out in the heat of such debates and must be studied against that landscape to be properly understood. Collier's writings and career reveal surprising willingness to embrace heterodox theological positions by Particular Baptist standards, especially in the late 1640s and after 1660. In the early period of his career he was enaroured of an allegorical, spiritualizing method of biblical interpretation and after 1660 he became increasingly hostile to limited atonement and election. The most orthodox phase of Collier's career was the period between 1653 and 1659 when he served as the leader of the Particular Baptists' Western Association. Under his leadership the association produced their Somerset Confession in 1656. After the Restoration Collier's disputes were increasingly with his fellow Particular Baptists. The publication of his Body of Divinity in 1674 and his Additional Word as a supplement to it in 1676 revealed increasingly divergent soteriological and eschatological views from those being espoused by the Particular Baptists. An attempt was made to discipline Collier by the London Baptist leadership, which was strongly and successfully resisted by Collier and his supporters within his local church in Southwick, Wiltshire. Collier's 1678 Confession of Faith, written in response to the London Baptists' adaptation of the Westminster Confession published the previous year, illustrated the wide breach of doctrine that had developed between Collier and his denominational colleagues.

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This thesis demonstrates the importance of scholastic philosophy and natural law to the theory of religious uniformity and toleration in Seventeenth-Century England. Some of the most influential apologetic tracts produced by the Church of England, including Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Robert Sanderson's Ten lectures on humane conscience and Samuel Parker A discourse of ecclesiastical politie are examined and are shown to belong to a common Anglican tradition which emphasized aspects of scholastic natural law theory in order to refute pleas for ceremonial diversity and liberty of conscience. The relationship of these ideas to those of Hobbes and Locke are also explored. Studies of Seventeenth-Century ideas about conformity and toleration have often stressed the reverence people showed the individual conscience, and the weight they attributed to the examples of the magistrates of Israel and Judah. Yet arguments for and against uniformity and toleration might instead resolve themselves into disputes about the role of natural law within society, or the power of human laws over the conscience. In this the debate about religious uniformity could acquire a very philosophical and sometimes theological tone. Important but technical questions about moral obligation, metaphysics and theology are demonstrated to have played an important role in shaping perceptions of magisterial power over religion. These ideas are traced back to their roots in scholastic philosophy and the Summa of Aquinas. Scholastic theories about conscience, law, the virtues, human action and the distinction between nature and grace are shown to have animated certain of the Church's more influential apologists and their dissenting opponents. The kind of discourse surrounding toleration and liberty of conscience is thus shown to be very different than sometimes supposed. Perceptions of civil and ecclesiastical power were governed by a set of ideas and concerns that have hitherto not featured prominently in the literature about the development of religious toleration.

This thesis examines the impact in mid- to later-seventeenth century England of the major contemporary religious controversy in France. The debates associated with this controversy, which revolved around the formal condemnation of a heresy popularly called Jansenism, involved fundamental questions about the doctrine of grace and moral theology, about the life of the Church and the conduct of individual Christians. In providing an analysis of the main themes of the controversy, and an account of instances of English interest, the thesis argues that English Protestant theologians in the process of working out their own views on basic theological questions recognised the relevance of the continental debates. It is further suggested that the theological arguments evolved by the French writers possess some value as a point of comparison for the developing views of English theologians. Where the Jansenists reasserted an Augustinian emphasis on the gratuity of salvation against Catholic theologians who over-valued the powers of human nature, the Anglican writers examined here, arguing against Protestant theologians who denied nature any moral potency, emphasised man's contribution to his own salvation. Both arguments have been seen to contain a corrosive individualism, the former through its preoccupation with the luminous experience of grace, the latter through its tendency to elide grace and moral virtue, and reduce Christianity to the voluntary ethical choices of individuals. These assessments, it is argued here, misrepresent the theologians in question. Nevertheless, their thought did encourage greater individualism and moral autonomy. For both groups, their opponents' theological premises were deficient to the extent that they vitiated morality; and in both cases their responses, centring on the transformation of the inner man by love, privileged the moral responsibility of the individual. Their moral 'rigorism', it is suggested, focusing on the affective experience of conversion, represented in both cases an attempt to provide a sound empirical basis for Christian faith and practice in the fragmented intellectual context of post-reformation Europe.

In Scotland the Revolution of 1688 - 1689 has received little academic attention - considered little more than an adjunct of events in England. Traditionally, the political elite have been seen as reluctant to rebel, the resulting Convention Parliament containing few committed protagonists - the reaction of most determined by inherent conservatism and the overwhelming desire to preserve their own interest and status. Motivated essentially by self-interest and personal gain, the predominance of noble faction crippled Parliament - a constitutionally underdeveloped institution - which became nothing more than a platform for the rivalry and ambition of the landed elite. However, this interpretation is based on the dated notion that Scottish history can be considered as simply a protracted power struggle between a dominant territorial nobility and a weak monarch, intent on centralising authority. Nonetheless, the aim of the thesis is not to rewrite the political history of the Revolution or to chart the constitutional development of Parliament - although both aspects form part of the general analysis. Instead, this is principally a thematic study of the membership of the Convention Parliament and what they achieved, in terms of legislation and procedure. Taking into account the European context, including a thorough membership analysis, and revising the practical aspects of the Revolution settlement, it is possible to offer a fresh account of contemporary politics. Introducing the extensive contest that characterised the general election of 1689, and the emergence and progress of court and country politics through 1698 - 1702, study reveals the continuing development of an inclusive party political system similar to that evident in England. In this respect, the objective of the thesis is to address the main themes associated with the Revolution and Convention Parliament, providing an alternative, more accurate interpretation of the Scottish Revolution experience.

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Since her work as a professional playwright in the 1670s and 1680s, critics have sought to equate Aphra Behn and her plays, to fix and stabilize the body of the writer and of her work. She has been marked as a prostitute, a feminist, and a masculinist hack, in each case her gender determining the value of and audience for her writing. This dissertation argues that Behn's plays--and Behn--should be read in terms of her controlling tropes and forms of performance and intrigue. Her plays and her presence use these tropes and forms to decenter the idea of identity and manipulate conventions of gender roles in the patriarchal Restoration theater. In doing so, she recasts and reconstitutes the structure of the patriarchal theater and economy. Chapter 1 introduces my argument and presents an overview of critical and feminist responses to Behn. I use this overview to present my own view of identity as performance, opposing such essentialist theorists as Helene Cixous. Chapter 2 develops the historical and metaphorical associations of intrigue and performance, beginning with her Preface to The Dutch Lover; in reading two of her lesser-known intrigue-comedies, The Dutch Lover and The Feign'd Curtezans, or a Night's Intrigue, I then argue that performance and intrigue challenge the conventional engendering of roles such as the rake and the courtesan. Chapter 3 expands these associations and reads her economic metaphors, as I look at Behn's most famous intrigue-comedy, The Rover, and its sequel; as well as challenging conventional roles and economic valuations, however, The Rover, Part II emphasizes the ultimate inescapability of these roles and valuations in the patriarchal theater. Chapter 4 moves to her town-comedies; I argue that Behn adapts the intrigue-form to her comedies of manners, working out the characters' struggle between convention and nature to define public and private selves. Sir Patient Fancy sets up the power that the manipulation of convention offers; The City Heiress emphasizes the limits of such manipulation; The Lucky Chance offers magic and ambiguity as new theatrical possibility to subvert convention and recast role.

My thesis examines Thomas Hobbes's attempt to develop a mathematical account of nature. I argue that Hobbes's conception of how we should think quantitatively about the world was deeply indebted to the ideas of his ancient and medieval predecessors. These ideas were often amenable to Hobbes's vision of a demonstrative, geometrically-based science. However, he was forced to adapt the ancient and medieval models to the demands of his own thoroughgoing materialism. This hybrid resulted in a distinctive, if only partially successful, approach to the problems of the new mechanical philosophy.