4 - Old worlds and new
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Livy … tells us so many quarrels and tumults arose about division of lands that the Senate knew not which way to prevent them till they disburdened the commonwealth by sending forth colonies and satisfying them with lands in the remote parts of Italy and other places.
Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth (1650)To Martiall men he opened wide the door of sea and land, for fame and conquest. To the nobly ambitious, the far stage of America, to win honor in. To the Religious divines … a calling of the last heathen to the Christian faith … [and] a large field of poor Christians, misled by the Idolatry of Rome … To the ingenuously industrious … new mysteries, and manufactures … To the Merchant … a fertile, and unexhausted earth. To the fortune-bound, liberty. To the Curious, a fruitfull womb of innovation.
Fulke Greville, Sir Philip Sidney (1652)INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY
Revolutions are harbingers of modernity. England's mid-seventeenth-century upheaval is frequently understood as the first revolution of the modern West. Yet at its ideological core we discover a humanist preoccupation with history in general and antiquity in particular; a protestant commitment to restoration of the purity of the primitive Christian religion; and a vigorous defence of classical and medieval commonwealth values against the ravages of contemporary economic, social and political change.
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- Commonwealth PrinciplesRepublican Writing of the English Revolution, pp. 85 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004