Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England

A window into the mental and cultural worlds of the Stuart period, capturing the existing religious, social and political tensions on the eve of the English Civil War. This book starts with an extraordinary event and document. The event is the trial and execution for infanticide of a puritan minister, John Barker, along with his wife's niece and their maid, in Northampton in 1637; the document,what appears to be a virtual transcript of Barker's last speech on the gallows. His downfall soon becam