Rachel Hammersley is an intellectual historian based at Newcastle University. She is interested in the history of political thought – particularly concepts such as republicanism, democracy and revolution – and in the ways in which political ideas intersect with religious beliefs. She is the author of several books and a number of articles including: French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790-1794; The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns; and (as editor) Revolutionary Moments: Reading Revolutionary Texts. Her intellectual biography of the seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington is due to appear with Oxford University Press in the autumn. Rachel also writes a regular blog which explores early modern political ideas and their relevance today: http://www.rachelhammersley.com