Book Description

This dissertation examines the place of handwritten tracts in the political life of early Stuart England. In the middle of the seventeenth century, England was rocked by civil war and revolution. Tracing the roots of those political upheavals in earlier decades has proved difficult and controversial. Recent work, however, has suggested that the key to the early Stuart regime's fortunes lay in the relationships between "high" political actors and "public" politics. These relationships were enormously complex, involving continuous negotiation and confrontation between elements of the early Stuart regime, different sorts of royal officers, church officials and various non-office holding subject populations including Catholics, women and the poor. This dimension of political life was also a major site for rivalry, competition and outright confrontation between actors making contrasting appeals for support. Such competition helped produce growing "political awareness" outside the circles of power; and the fact of this political awareness only increased the importance of public politics. This dissertation approaches this dynamic through the examination of a strangely neglected archive. Handwritten manuscripts were an important means for political communication and polemic during the early Stuart era and were critical to the development and popularization of "political awareness" in the decades before the English civil war. Through examining manuscript tracts from different angles, this dissertation argues that the political communication of the early Stuart era was much wider in its audience, more sophisticated in its methods and more powerful in its analysis than is usually appreciated. In a variety of circumstances, political actors both inside and outside the regime used manuscript circulation to manufacture consent and cooperation with regime policies or to disrupt regime projects; to further and defend their personal reputations; and to embarrass their rivals and enemies before a large audience. Early Stuart manuscript tracts--hundreds of which survive in thousands of copies--constitutes a corpus of political literature that dwarfs the output of the pre-1640 press. The sheer quantity of surviving manuscript tracts and the extensive evidence for circulation and reproduction all testify to the immense contemporary interest the tracts commanded. Their importance is confirmed by substantial ancillary evidence. Manuscript tracts were copied into diaries, passed to friends and relatives, purchased from scriveners and notaries and were subject to gossip and intense regime scrutiny. Surviving readers' notes document how readers used the tracts to acquire the habits of "political" thought. Across the kingdom, people learned to tell stories about politics: to interpret events by linking them together and imagining hidden causes. Through manuscript circulation, illicit political discourse--explicit attacks on major figures within the regime, hostile interpretations of government actions and denunciations of supposed plots against English liberties--became widely available and known. The production and circulation of manuscript tracts was an important tactical resource for political actors both inside and outside the regime; and the consumption of manuscript tracts was central to the spread of political ideas.