Author : Alastair Bellany
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 21,16 MB
Release : 2007-01-29
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780521035439
This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.
Author : Susan D. Amussen
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 11,46 MB
Release : 2017-04-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1350020699
Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 integrates social history, politics and literary culture as part of a ground-breaking study that provides revealing insights into early modern English society. Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown examine political scandals and familiar characters-including scolds, cuckolds and witches-to show how their behaviour turned the ordered world around them upside down in very specific, gendered ways. Using case studies from theatre, civic ritual and witchcraft, the book demonstrates how ideas of gendered inversion, failed patriarchs, and disorderly women permeate the mental world of early modern England. Amussen and Underdown show both how these ideas were central to understanding society and politics as well as the ways in which both women and men were disciplined formally and informally for inverting the gender order. In doing so, they give a glimpse of how we can connect different dimensions of early modern society. This is a vital study for anyone interested in understanding the connections between social practice, culture, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century England.
Author : Linda Levy Peck
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 17,2 MB
Release : 2003-08-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1134870426
This wide-ranging volume goes to the heart of the revisionist debate about the crisis of government that led to the English Civil War. The author tackles questions about the patronage that structured early modern society, arguing that the increase in royal bounty in the early seventeenth century redefined the corrupt practices that characterized early modern administration.
Author : Johanna Rickman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 31,36 MB
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 1351921223
Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor infraction, others, directed by a religious moral code, viewed it as a serious sin. seeks to illuminate the place of noblewomenin early modern aristocratic culture, both as historical subjects (considering personal circumstances) and as a social group (considering social position and status).She argues that two different gender ideals were in operation simultaneously: one primarily religious ideal, which lauded female silence, obedience, and chastity, and another, more secular ideal, which required noblewomen to be beautiful, witty, brave, and receptive to the games of courtly love.
Author : John Connor Higgins
Publisher :
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 12,64 MB
Release : 2011
Category : England
ISBN : 9781124802480
My dissertation draws on recent methodological and theoretical developments in social history in order to rethink the political significance of formal experimentation in early 17th century English theater. Specifically, I argue that formal experiments in four Jacobean plays should be read as participating in a process whereby early modern rulers and the people they ostensibly commanded negotiated and struggled over the meanings of dominant political discourses and the legitimate uses of governing institutions. Recent social historical work on "popular politics" has drawn attention to the fact that local officials and private citizens both manipulated tropes of authority and obedience and appropriated governing institutions - including the militia, the jury trial and the public execution - in order to meet their own political needs rather than those of the court. By focusing on popular political activity, I reconsider the new historicist claim that, "Power in early modern England was performative," in order to emphasize the participatory, contested nature of performance as a social activity, and the overdetermined, negotiated nature of the period's political hegemony. The plays that I analyze not only include characters and images drawn from popular political life but also actively participate in this negotiation by appropriating dominant governing discourses and institutions for the benefit of the players and playwrights and the entertainment of diverse audiences. In each chapter, I engage in an intertextual analysis that reads a single, experimental play in conversation with different historical texts - including pamphlets, chronicle histories and trial records - that record and respond to the appropriation of authority. The first chapter reads Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster in relation to divine right treatises, political rumors and popular protests. The second chapter reads Shakespeare's Measure for Measure as a manipulation of the dominant legal discourse surrounding justice and mercy. The third chapter places John Webster's The White Devil into conversation with legal rituals like trials and public executions. The final chapter reads Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair alongside various texts describing the demographic changes to the early modern London metropolis and the struggles of the city government to manage these changes.
Author : Una McIlvenna
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 18,34 MB
Release : 2016-05-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317059328
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt. Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage. Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.
Author : Joshua Eckhardt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 23,63 MB
Release : 2016-05-13
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN : 1317101057
Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England models and refines the study of these complicated collections. Several of its contributors question and redefine the terms we use to describe miscellanies and anthologies. Two senior scholars correct the misidentification of a scribe and, in so doing, uncover evidence of a Catholic, probably Jesuit, priest and community in a trio of manuscripts. Additional contributors show compilers interpreting, attributing, and arranging texts, as well as passively accepting others’ editorial decisions. While manuscript verse miscellanies remain appropriately central to the collection, several essays also involve print and prose, ranging from letters to sermons and even political prophesies. Using extensive textual and bibliographical evidence, the collection offers stimulating new readings of literature, politics, and religion in the early modern period, and promises to make important interventions in academic studies of the history of the book.
Author : C. Levin
Publisher : Springer
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 35,55 MB
Release : 2008-10-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0230615732
Dreaming the English Renaissance examines ideas about dreams, actual dreams people had and recorded, and the many ways dreams were used in the culture and politics of the Tutor/Stuart age in order to provide a window into the mental life and the most profound beliefs of people of the time.
Author : William J. Bulman
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 48,51 MB
Release : 2022-06-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1526151340
This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain. These chapter will be essential reading for students of early modern Britain, early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. They will also appeal to those interested in the religious and political history of other regions and periods.
Author : R. Malcolm Smuts
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 769 pages
File Size : 31,49 MB
Release : 2023-01-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0192677837
In the period between 1575 and 1625, civic peace in England, Scotland, and Ireland was persistently threatened by various kinds of religiously inspired violence, involving conspiracies, rebellions, and foreign invasions. Religious divisions divided local communities in all three kingdoms, but they also impacted relations between the nations, and in the broader European continent. The challenges posed by actual or potential religious violence gave rise to complex responses, including efforts to impose religious uniformity through preaching campaigns and regulation of national churches; an expanded use of the press as a medium of religious and political propaganda; improved government surveillance; the selective incarceration of English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics; and a variety of diplomatic and military initiatives, undertaken not only by royal governments but also by private individuals. The result was the development of more robust and resilient, although still vulnerable, states in all three kingdoms and, after the dynastic union of Britain in 1603, an effort to create a single state incorporating all of them. R. Malcolm Smuts traces the story of how this happened by moving beyond frameworks of national and institutional history, to understand the ebb and flow of events and processes of religious and political change across frontiers. The study pays close attention to interactions between the political, cultural, intellectual, ecclesiastical, military, and diplomatic dimensions of its subject. A final chapter explores how and why provisional solutions to the problem of violent, religiously inflected conflict collapsed in the reign of Charles I.
