Dissolving Commonwealths

In 1649, the King of England was beheaded. Soon after, Parliament abolished the monarchy altogether. Yet this break with the past would not give way to unanimity: the next decade would give rise to innumerable competing visions of the political future. What's more, the regicide was only one "dissolution" that shaped political life in the C16th & C17th. Established orders collapsed under the pressure of religious, imperial, environmental, and intellectual change. We will turn to Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harrington, Marvell, Cavendish, and others to see how dissolutions shaped the emergence of a recognizably modern political world.