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Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe British North America developed from a landscape of religions into a nation of races over the course of the eighteenth century.This process culminated in a hot, locked Philadelphia hall in 1787, but the lessons upon which the drafters drew reached back to the Reformation of the sixteenth century and earlier to Rome. Americans had, after all, just rejected their inclusion in the British variant. If they failed to grasp the significance of their success, Edward Gibbon’s  Decline and Fall of Rome,  David Hume’s History of England,  and the tales of Robin Hood 1   served to remind them of the dangers of remote rule. Early Modern Europe possessed two empires with established Protestant populations inhabiting borders under perpetual threat. The Holy Roman Empire’s borderland Protestants included the Southwestern Germans of Wuerttemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate, for whom “ cuius regio, eius religio ” offered precious little protection fro...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù (e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels. The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead ( Sense & Sensibility ) or emasculated by poverty ( Pride & Prejudice , Northanger Abbey , Mansfield Park ), frailty ( Emma ), and vanity ( Persuasion ).  It takes little ima...

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