Algernon Sidney’s Calvinist Republicanism and the End of the Long Sixteenth Century

Lecture | November 9 | 4-4:30 p.m. | 201 Moses Hall

Speaker/Performer: Michael P. Winship, E. Merton Coulter Professor of History at the University of Georgia

Sponsors: European Studies, Institute of, British Studies, Center of

Algernon Sidney’s masterwork Discourses Concerning Government, was one of the most popular books on political theory in the eighteenth century and inspired luminaries of liberty as various as Montesquieu, Franklin, and Jefferson. It has long been assumed that Sidney, active in the Rump Parliament’s republic, was a
proto-Enlightenment figure in his religion. He was, in fact, a Calvinist and his Calvinism was integral to his republicanism. While many historians argue that Calvinism and republicanism were incompatible, this paper places Sidney and the Discourses in the context of arguments about liberty and tyranny that radical puritans had been having with their opponents since the Elizabethan Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright’s debate with John Whitgift.

Michael P. Winship is E. Merton Coulter Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He has written numerous books and articles on American and English Puritanism. His most recent essay “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570-1606" appears in the current issue of the English Historical Review.

Event Contact: 510-643-2115