The mystery’s radical social politics, Chapter 2 argues, lies less in its melodramatic attempts to spur social action than in its attention to the trope of the misleading clue. The urban Mysteries purport to offer readers a “social kaleidoscope,” the name of a magical x-ray apparatus the demon Asmodeus gives the narrator in George Thompson’s Revelations of Asmodeus (1849) so that he can see “all things in two aspects – as they seem, and as they really are.” However, the mystery’s relish in disguise and delight in turning clues of social identity on their heads make its “social kaleidoscope” work like an actual kaleidoscope, utterly shaking up confidence in visible identity. The mystery showcases a kind of kaleidoscopic seeing that fragments and collapses divisions between people, fostering recognition of human commonality and new forms of social trust. The Mysteries’ interest in social marginality as a potential source of social power aligns them with radical, transatlantic political movements such as socialism, republicanism, abolition, and early feminism. These elements also importantly shape the literary detective, who incubates in the Mysteries as an often-marginal figure who gains power by exploiting indeterminacy and by masterfully reading and manipulating signs

Chapter 1 highlights the changing definitions of republicanism in light of the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, debates over slavery, and the admission of new states. The Twelfth Amendment elevated the voters to a central position in republican theory by creating an expectation that the President be the choice of a majority of those who wield political power on behalf of the state. This version of majoritarianism, filtered through the medium of political parties, also became a limit on the types of political systems that states could adopt in accordance with the Guarantee Clause. However, Congress’s power under the Clause was stunted because of a slaveocracy that consistently made federalism arguments to protect that institution, even when such arguments were contrary to newly redefined republican ideals.

The right to vote and the right to alter or abolish government – the foundation of the Constitution of Political Rights – were defined by state law for the period leading up to the Civil War, and congressional attempts to regulate these rights directly were virtually nonexistent. Instead, Congress used its authority under the Elections Clause to “make or alter” state regulations and under Article I, Section 5, to judge the elections of its members, to police federal elections. When acting pursuant to these provisions – key aspects of the Constitution of Political Structure – Congress interpreted its authority as broadly as circumstances warranted, which indirectly impacted, and in some cases, limited, the states’ authority to determine the membership of their electorates. In the onslaught of secession, President Lincoln and Congress were forced to rethink not only the continued viability of the right to alter or abolish government, but also to conceptualize a new version of the political community of “We the Voters” – one premised on loyalty to the union rather than racial and economic restrictions.

Federal authority to regulate voting and elections derives from structural provisions that serve as express delegations of power to Congress, rather than the courts, the executive branch, or the states. Known collectively as the “Constitution of Political Structure,” these provisions include the Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4; The Elections Clause of Article I, Section 4; Article I, Section 5; and later, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) argues that the Guarantee Clause, the Elections Clause, and Article I, Section 5, defined the basic parameters of the federal–state relationship over elections during the founding and antebellum periods. Notably, Congress’s deference to the states when acting pursuant to these provisions was not driven solely by abstract concerns about federalism, but focused on political disputes surrounding slavery and whether state election procedures adequately ensured the continued existence and legitimacy of federal elections consistent with republican ideals.

This chapter explores the political implications of reprinting Othello in republican England. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the publication of early modern drama during the mid seventeenth century, examining how the ban on theatrical performance and the circumstances of civil war and revolution shaped the production and reception of pre-Civil War plays. The chapter builds on these studies by situating Othello within the ideological currents of English republicanism, focusing on the ways in which Venice, the play’s setting, took on new and pressing significance during the 1650s as a model of kingless governance. Renowned both for its elitist, rather than populist, tendencies as well as for its institutional stability, Venice exemplified an aristocratic form of republicanism that promised to secure traditional social hierarchies. By reprinting Othello in 1655, the bookseller William Leake capitalized on the topicality and political associations of the play’s Venetian milieu.

This chapter introduces the U.S. Constitution by exploring its purposes, functions, and significance as a written document, contrasting it with Britain’s unwritten constitutional system. It argues that a written constitution limits governmental power, including legislative authority, unlike the British system of parliamentary supremacy. The chapter traces the American shift in the 1760s toward viewing constitutions as superior laws fixed by the people’s consent and enforceable against the legislature. It outlines the settlement functions of constitutions – establishing government structures, ensuring stability, and channeling disputes – emphasizing how written constitutions enhance these functions. The chapter further examines the ends of free government, balancing liberty and order through democratic self-governance and the protection of natural rights, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s preamble. It introduces the Constitution’s structural features – separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances – while addressing critiques of its alleged undemocratic nature and introducing the Founders’ intent to create republican remedies for the diseases most incident to republican government.

Chapter 3 explores A. C. Swinburne’s intermedial engagement with Milton. In Swinburne’s republican poetry, Milton emerges as a significant figure associated with virtue and freedom; both poets link questions of liberty to bodily violence. The chapter discusses Milton’s Areopagitica, the divorce tracts and the Piedmont sonnet alongside Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, before turning to Paradise Lost. The chapter draws on queer readings of Milton’s epic to argue that Milton’s erotic, androgynous universe informs Swinburne’s anti-theistic poetic project, particularly in its treatment of bodily indeterminacy and the figure of the hermaphrodite. Swinburne’s reading of Milton is considered alongside his reading of Sappho and Charles Baudelaire, as well as William Blake: Swinburne alludes to erotic moments in Paradise Lost at the same time as he transforms William Blake’s illustrations of the poem, in an act of commingling presented as an example of Swinburne’s ‘intermedial ekphrasis’.

This book offers a selection of key texts mostly written by leading figures in the history of Spanish American political thought during the first century of independence. Political thinkers in the region had to grapple with rather unique and extraordinary circumstances after three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. The emergence of a significant number of new independent polities that adopted representative institutions in an era when absolutism still prevailed in Western Europe, their general adoption of republicanism (except for Mexico during the brief rule of Agustín de Iturbide in 1822–1823, and Maximilian in 1864–1867), and their complex demographic composition, all posed serious challenges for the formation and consolidation of national states in Spanish America. In dialogue with the major currents of thought in Western Europe and North America, Spanish American thinkers often reflected upon these and other related problems while being politically engaged, either in government or in opposition.

The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

This chapter analyses the Repeal movement led by Daniel O’Connell during the 1830s and 1840s, which attempted to undo the Act of Union and restore Ireland’s parliament. O’Connell framed Repeal as a constitutional restoration - a return to Grattan’s Parliament - but infused it with mass mobilization tactics honed during Catholic emancipation. The movement’s tensions are revealed through its ideological factions: O’Connell’s moderate "Old Ireland" favouring gradual reform within British frameworks, and the more radical "Young Ireland," influenced by classical republican ideals. The chapter explores how Young Irelanders like Thomas Davis conceptualised Irish self-government not just as legislative autonomy but as cultural and economic sovereignty, diverging from O’Connell’s pragmatic focus on institutional restoration. The catastrophic Famine (1845–52) deepened these divides, exposing the Union’s failures and radicalizing demands for self-rule. Ultimately, the chapter shows how Repeal became a crucible for competing visions of Irish representation - from O’Connell’s loyalist parliamentarianism to Young Ireland’s revolutionary separatism - laying groundwork for later republican and Home Rule movements.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

The French imaginary is a Republican imaginary that is premised on political liberty. The red thread across the political thought and the various constitutions of France has been the pursuit of the ideal political regime that would best realise political liberty and the general interest. That approach stands in stark contrast with the civil-liberty-focused Anglo-American liberal tradition, according to which state power ought to be curtailed in order to maximise individual rights. Those two essentially different traditions could rather peacefully coexist in Europe at the Westphalian time of the nation-states. The clash has, however, become inevitable in a time where globalisation and the latter’s regional avatars act as vehicles of Anglo-American liberalism. This chapter introduces the French constitutional imaginary, relying on the tools provided by intellectual history and constitutional law. It contrasts it with the Anglo-American political thought and shows how the former has remained strong despite the erosion caused by the pervasiveness of the latter.

The epilogue provides a summary of the book’s main conclusions, followed by an overview of the key developments in the translation of the classics in the decades after 1580 and their continuities and discontinuities with the period covered by the book. It highlights the translation of more openly oppositional or subversive texts and the publication of complete translations of the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, often in folio format with extensive scholarly apparatus, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that the vernacular literature of the later Elizabethan period drew on translations of the classics produced in the middle years of the sixteenth century not just as linguistic and literary models but also for their topical application of ancient texts to Tudor England and intervention in contemporary political debates that contributed to the development of the public sphere.