Politics, Religion and Culture in 1670s Britain and Ireland
This conference was held in Bangor on 24-26 July, 2007, and considered the events and writings of the period between the Treaty of Dover and the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681. It featured plenary talks by Sharon Achinstein (Oxford), Martin Dzelzains (London), Tim Harris (Brown), Nigel Smith (Princeton), John Spurr (Swansea), and James Grantham Turner (UC Berkeley); and - whilst ranging over a variety of topics from artistic patronage and female writing, to the British question and the public sphere - came to concentrate on the contemporary debates about policing orthodox faith and morality in a society where agreement about the basic axioms of belief and behaviour had broken down. This collapse of consensus was, perhaps, the true crisis of the decade – of which the more familiar political tensions and their literary expressions were consequences. A volume of selected papers from the conference is forthcoming from the University of Wales Press.
Professor Tony Claydon
Professor Thomas Corns