For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia

Alexander Haskell ’92 recovers a largely forgotten English Renaissance mindset that regarded sovereignty and Providence as being fundamentally entwined in For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (University of North Carolina Press). The first English planters in Virginia operated not in an era of early modern entrepreneurism but within a deeply providential age, and they saw the first successful venture in America as an exercise in divinely inspired and approved commonwealth creation.