Reading and politics in early modern England: The mental world of a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman

This book examines the activities of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman, and using the approaches of the history of reading, provides a detailed analysis of his mindset.

Blundell was neither the passive victim nor the entirely loyal subject that he and others have claimed. He actively defended his family from the penal laws and used the relative freedom that this gave him to patronise other Catholics. Not only did he rewrite the histories of recent civil conflicts to ...