 | Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 Subjects: Sandys Edwin Sir 1561–1629; Great Britain -- History -- James I 1603–1625 -- Biography; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1603–1625; Great Britain. Parliament -- History -- 17th century; Legislators -- Great Britain -- Biography; Theodore K. Rabb, one of the leading historians of early modern Europe, presents here the first full-scale biography of the influential English parliamentarian, colonizer, and religious thinker Sir Edwin Sandys (1561-1629). Rabb has studied Sandys's life and work for more than thirty years and shows that he played a vital role in the Jacobean Age's two most distinctive achievements: the early development of England's constitutional structure and the overseas expansion that began the British empire. Sandys made his contributions, Rabb demonstrates, in the course of an extraordinarily diverse career. Sandys sat in the House of Commons from the 1580s to the mid-1620s, becoming its elder statesman and most influential voice on economic affairs, constitutional issues, and parliamentary procedure. He was a leader of the Virginia Company and the Bermuda Company, which established and settled these two early English colonies, and was also a director of the East India Company. And in an age beset by religious extremism, Sandys wrote a book on religious toleration that was widely read and discussed throughout Europe. reassessment of parliamentary politics on the eve of the English Civil War. Rabb shows that Sandys helped shape gentry positions, independent of Crown or Court, on major political issues, which in turn gave the House of Commons a new prominence in English affairs. This long-needed work will prompt a reexamination of vital aspects of the constitutional, colonial, and religious history of the Stuart period. Theodore J. Rabinowicz was born in Teplice-Sanov, Czechoslovakia on March 5, 1937. He received bachelor's and master's degrees at Queen's College, Oxford and a Ph.D. in European and colonial American history from Princeton University. He taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University before joining the faculty at Princeton in 1967. He took emeritus status there in 2006. He was an expert in European history, who believed in an interdisciplinary approach to teaching history. In 1970, he was one of the founding editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. He wrote numerous books including Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575-1630; Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age; The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity; The Artist and the Warrior: Military History Through the Eyes of the Masters; and Why Does Michelangelo Matter?: A Historian's Questions About the Visual Arts. He died on January 7, 2019 at the age of 81. (Bowker Author Biography) |
