With its challenging, paradoxical thesis that Elizabethan England was a 'republic which happened also to be a monarchy', Patrick Collinson's 1987 essay 'The Mon

Includes contributions from key early modern historians, this book uses and critiques the notion of the public sphere to produce a new account of England in the

How much power does a monarch really have? How much autonomy do they enjoy? Who regulates the size of the royal family, their finances, the rules of succession?

First modern analysis of the custom of the "royal touch" in the Tudor and Stuart reigns.

Bad Queen Bess? analyses the back and forth between the Elizabethan regime and various Catholic critics, who, from the early 1570s to the early 1590s, sought to