Beginning with the ascent of James I and ending with the 1701 Act of Settlement, Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature is the first study to offer a comprehensive reading of literary engagements with the epistemological and political questions of family surrounding the crises of succession that defined this period. Examining how works by John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell used form to participate in key moments in the period's politics of genealogy, this book moves beyond discussion of the family-state analogy. By investigating the intersection of the lineal and the analogical, the reproductive as well as the paternal, Familial Forms provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family.