This talk examines a critical period in Western history and literary culture when the interconnected keywords and concepts of “freedom” and “tyranny” were bitterly contested, redefined and recreated, and, in some cases, reimagined.  I will be talking about the English Revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period when press censorship largely collapsed, ushering in a new age of “free writing and free speaking” (as the great poet and polemicist John Milton described it in 1644). This was a remarkably fertile if volatile period—unstable because of intense religious conflict, experimental in terms of governments, and violent due to civil wars, yet exceptionally generative in terms of fresh ways of thinking about freedom and tyranny. While notions of freedom and tyranny then often drew upon the Bible and upon Greek and Roman authorities, these concepts were also redefined in a variety of radical ways by such writers as Hobbes, Milton, and the English Levellers. Lowenstein's talk aims to illuminate how these concepts became a major battleground in seventeenth-century England, a crucial period in Western history and culture for understanding the ways these keywords and ideas were contested, much as they continue to be in our own world.