The Excellencie of a Free-State. Marchamont Nedham
of The Excellencie in 1767, the version in which it has been primarily known. The reappearance of the work, under the sponsorship of the wealthy English bibliophile and “commonwealthman” Thomas Hollis, belonged to a literary enterprise that has had substantial consequences for political argument on both sides of the Atlantic. Liberty Fund, the publisher of the present volume, was founded by the widely read businessman Pierre Goodrich, with the aim of promoting understanding of ideas of liberty. Hollis had the same purpose. In pursuit of it he arranged the reproduction and dissemination of seventeenth-century writings that have become known as a canon of Whig literature. Although Hollis did not claim, or achieve, for Nedham a standing equal to that of Milton, Sidney, or Harrington, he maintained that Nedham’s writing deserved attention alongside theirs. Modern perspectives on the history of political thought vindicate his assertion.
Blair Worden
[print edition page xi]
Editors need the aid of experts and colleagues and are gladdened when, as in my case, it comes with kindness and generosity. I warmly thank Laura Goetz and David Womersley, my guides at Liberty Fund; Susan Halpert of the Houghton Library at Harvard and Colin Higgins of the Library of Christ’s College, Cambridge; and scholars Rodney Allan, Harald Braun, Justin Champion, Mark Greengrass, Rachel Hammersley, Alan Houston, Paul Rahe, and David Wootton. Two debts, both of them to skillful and enterprising young historians, are exceptional: to Richard Foster, whose assistance in the preparation of the text and the textual apparatus has gone beyond his mechanical brief; and to Moses Tannenbaum, who has supplied me with invaluable information about the reception of the eighteenth-century edition of The Excellencie in America.
[print edition page xii]
[print edition page xiii]
| Blackburne | [Francis Blackburne,] Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 2 vols., continuous pagination (London, 1780) |
| E | The Excellencie of a Free-State (London, 1656) |
| HD | Thomas Hollis, Diary, MS. Eng. 1191, Houghton Library, Harvard |
| Knachel | Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. Philip Knachel (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1969) |
| LP | Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007, 2nd printing 2009) |
| MP | Mercurius Politicus |
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