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Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans
Seventeenth-Century Essays
Hugh Trevor-Roper
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Renaissance Essays, published in 1985, confirmed Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation as one of the most distinguished writers of history and as an unequaled master of the historical essay. Received with critical acclaim in both England and the United States, the volume gathered wide-ranging essays on both British and European history from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth centuries. This sequel, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, is composed of five previously unpublished essays on the intellectual and religious movements which lay behind the Puritan revolution in England and Ireland.

The opening essay, a skillful work of historical detection, investigates the strange career of Nicholas Hill. In "Laudianism and Political Power," Trevor-Roper returns to the subject of his first, now classic, book. He analyzes the real significance of the ecclesiastical movement associated with Archbishop Laud and speculates on what might have happened if the Stuarts had not abandoned it. "James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh" deals with a key figure in the intellectual and religious life of his time. A long essay on "The Great Tew Circle" reinstates Lord Falkland as an important influence on the continuity of ideas through the English revolution. The final essay reassesses the political ideology of Milton.

English intellectual history, as Trevor-Roper constructs it here for the seventeenth century, is conditioned by its social and political context. Always engaging and fresh, these essays deal with currently interesting historical topics and up-to-date controversies.
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From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution
Hugh Trevor-Roper
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This collection is the third in a series which gathers the best historical essays of Hugh Trevor-Roper, considered by many the unequalled master of the form.

The pieces here range from an account of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's mission in China in the sixteenth century to a discussion of the Anglo-Scottish Union. They include essays on medicine at the early Stuart Court, on the plunder of artistic treasures in Europe during the wars of the seventeenth century, on the plans of Hugo Grotius to create a new universal church on an Anglican base, on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and religious toleration thereafter. There are also biographical studies of Archbishop Laud, Matthew Wren, the Earl of Clarendon, and Prince Rupert.

As Noel argument wrote in Our Age, Hugh Trevor-Roper has "perfected the historical essay as the most beguiling form of enlightening readers about the past. He is the most eloquent, sophisticated and assured historian of Our Age, and has never written an inelegant sentence or produced an incoherent arguement."
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The Last Days of Hitler
Hugh Trevor-Roper
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Late in 1945, Trevor-Roper was appointed by British Intelligence in Germany to investigate conflicting evidence surrounding Hitler's final days and to produce a definitive report on his death. The author, who had access to American counterintelligence files and to German prisoners, focuses on the last ten days of Hitler's life, April 20-29, 1945, in the underground bunker in Berlin—a bizarre and gripping episode punctuated by power play and competition among Hitler's potential successors.

"From exhaustive research [Trevor-Roper] has put together a carefully documented, irrefutable, and unforgettable reconstruction of the last days in April, 1945."—New Republic

"A book sound in its scholarship, brilliant in its presentation, a delight for historians and laymen alike."—A. J. P. Taylor, New Statesman
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The Lisle Letters
An Abridgement
Edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne
University of Chicago Press, 1983
In a one-volume abridgement, these sixteenth-century letters paint a magnificent portrait of family life amidst the intrigue, terror, and politics of the court of Henry VIII. The culmination of Lord Lisle's imprisonment in the Tower of London.
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front cover of Renaissance Essays
Renaissance Essays
Hugh Trevor-Roper
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over many years in many different forms, are now difficult to find. This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance.

Covering a wide range of topics, these writings reflect the many facets of Trevor-Roper's interest in intellectual and cultural history. Included are discussions of Renaissance Venice; the arts as patronized by that "universal man," the Emperor Maximilian I; the court of Henry VIII and the ideas of Sir Thomas More; the Lisle Letters and the formidable Cromwellian revolution; the historiography and the historical philosophy of the Elizabethans John Stow and William Camden; religion and the "judicious Hooker," the great doctor of the Anglican Church; medicine and medical philosophy, shaken out of its orthodoxy by Paracelsus and his disciples; literature and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and the ideology of the Renaissance courts.

Trevor-Roper sets his intellectual and cultural history in a context of society and politics: in realization of ideas, the patronage of the arts, the interpretation of history, the social challenge of science, the social application of religion. This volume of essays confirms his reputation as a spectacular writer of history and master essayist.
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