While the life and writings of Sir Robert Filmer may be less familiar to students of seventeenth-century prose than those of his literary and political opponents, his literary career as a defender of absolute monarchy is significant for what it reveals not only about his participation in the political crises of his day but also about authorship during the early seventeenth century. Although he was well known and respected by historians, lawyers, and scholars of his time, his reputation as a polemicist of absolutism, both monarchical and domestic, was largely created by subsequent generations of opponents--in particular by John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government (1690) was written thirty-six years after Filmer's death to refute the political position represented by Filmer's Patriarcha (1680). Filmer's analyses of absolute monarchy and its biblical origins form the subject matter of most of his printed texts; less well known but equally important are his...