This indispensable introductory guide offers students a number of highly focused chapters on key themes in Restoration history. Each addresses a core question relating to the period 1660-1714, and uses artistic and literary sources - as well as more traditional texts of political history - to illustrate and illuminate arguments. George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell provide clear analyses of different aspects of the era whilst maintaining an overall coherence based on three central propositions:
- 1660-1714 represents a political world fundamentally influenced by the civil wars and interregnum
- The period can best be understood by linking together types of evidence too often separated in conventional accounts
- The high politics of kings and their courts should be examined within broader social and geographical contexts