Liberty and Love

The latter half of the seventeenth century was a time of great social and political upheaval, reflected in the literature of the period in a way which is often bewildering to the modern reader. Choosing two themes which greatly occupied contemporary writers—the state as an enlarged family, and the family as the state in miniature—Peter Malekin in his book Liberty and Love (originally published in 1981) brings both critical insight and research in social history to bear on a rich variety of seven