Research: People and Multitude in Early Modern England: Towards a Conceptual HistoryThe project investigates the concepts of people and multitude in early modern English political discourse, mainly in the seventeenth century, by combining the use of distant reading techniques in a broad corpus of texts of various genres, such as political tracts and constitutional documents, with more in-depth studies of some major political thinkers of the era, e.g. Hobbes, Filmer, Winstanley. The research is in dialogue with recent scholarship on the politics of popularity and the emergence of the public sphere in early modern England, as well as the work of the Cambridge school of history of political thought and the German and Italian traditions of conceptual history.
keywords
conceptual history; history of political thought; intellectual history; political philosophy; history of early modern England