Devising and teaching a creative writing courseThe impetus for introducing a Creative Writing course into the Englisli subject area of our BA(Hons) Humanities degree at Huddersfield Polytechnic came from the students. Many of them wrote poems and stories, and a few years ago a group of students and I formed a voluntary extra-curricular group which met regularly to read and criticise each other's work and to encourage further writing.It was frequently suggested that creative writing should be part of the formal course and, while I agreed, I could envisage many difficulties in realising their wishes, and see many problems in making creative writing an option on a degree course every other part of which was examinable. Traditionalists in the English Department were not encouraging and neither, at first, was our external examiner. There were horrifying storiesprobably apocryphalof creative writing courses in American higher education; questions as to how it could be examined were reiterated; and even how student writing could be assessed. These same people, like all English teachers, were undeterred from making comparative evaluations of established writers, of course. The probable reaction of the CNAA

This article argues for an ideologically neutral understanding of the early Enlightenment, the Enlightenment public, and later Stuart religious politics. It approaches these topics from the perspective of the book trade. Thomas Hobbes's publisher and man of business in the 1670s, William Crooke, set up his London bookshop as a public forum on ‘Hobbism’ that showcased the confrontation between the Anglican clergy and their most formidable foe. In his shop, Crooke set scribal copies of illicit Hobbes tracts alongside the works of his second prized author, an Enlightened Anglican apologist named Lancelot Addison. The stationer's projects included two separate schemes to publish a controversial Hobbes tract and a bishop's response to it in a single volume. The shop was frequented not only by some of the period's foremost republicans, tolerationists, and freethinkers, but also by powerful members of the political and religious establishment, many of whom condoned and actively supported Crooke's schemes. This case-study shows from the ground up why the early Enlightenment is most profitably understood as a site of struggle between competing schemes for making internecine bloodshed a thing of the past.

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This is an original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and North Africa, William Bulman shows that this period witnessed not a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He demonstrates that the Church's historical scholarship, social science, pastoral care, and political practice amounted not to a culturally backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalization. In seeking to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided over what it meant in practice.

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