Author: Noah Millstone Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131656522X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 375
Book Description
In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone provides the first systematic account of the production, circulation and reception of these manuscript pamphlets. By placing them in the context of social change, state formation, and the emergence of 'politic' expertise, Millstone uses the pamphlets to resolve one of the central problems of early Stuart history: how and why did the men and women of early seventeenth-century England come to see their world as political?
Author: Noah Chaim Millstone Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
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.
Author: Kevin Sharpe Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804722612 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
In recent years new schools of historiography and criticism have recast the political and cultural histories of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. However, for all the benefits of their insights, most revisionist historians have too narrowly focussed on high politics to the neglect of values and ideology, and New Historicist literary scholars have displayed an insufficient grasp of chronology and historical context. The contributors to this pioneering volume, richly fusing these approaches, apply a revisionist close attention to moments to the wide range of texts - verbal and visual - that critics have begun to read as representations of power and politics. Excitingly broadening the range of areas and evidence for the study of politics, these outstanding essays demonstrate how the study of high culture - classical translations, court portraits royal palaces, the conduct of chivalric ceremony - and low culture - cheap pamphlets and scurrilous verses - enable us to reconstruct the languages through which contemporaries interpreted their political environment. The volume posits a reconsideration of the traditional antithetical concepts - court and country, verbal and visual, critical and complimentary, elite and popular; examines the constructions of a moral and social order enacted in a wide variety of cultural practices; and demonstrates how common vocabularies could in changed circumstances be combined and deployed to sustain quite different ideological positions. This book opens a new agenda for the study of the politics of culture and the culture of politics in early modern England. -- Publisher's website.
Author: J. P. Kenyon Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521313278 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 504
Book Description
Originally published in 1966, this text established itself as the standard work in 17th century English history in the course of time. The second edition includes a rewritten commentary and has been thoroughly revised and updated in several important areas.
Author: Kevin Sharpe Publisher: Pinter Publishers ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
Kevin Sharpe reassesses the role that ideology, rhetoric and intellectual discussion played in the upheavals of seventeenth-century England.
Author: Aysha Pollnitz Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107039525 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 463
Book Description
This book shows how liberal education taught Tudor and Stuart monarchs to wield pens like swords and transformed political culture in early modern Britain.
Author: Edward Muir Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521841535 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
The comprehensive 2005 study of rituals in early modern Europe argues that between about 1400 and 1700 a revolution in ritual theory took place that utterly transformed concepts about time, the body, and the presence of spiritual forces in the world. Edward Muir draws on extensive historical research to emphasize the persistence of traditional Christian ritual practices even as educated elites attempted to privilege reason over passion, textual interpretation over ritual action, and moral rectitude over gaining access to supernatural powers. Edward Muir discusses wide ranging themes such as rites of passage, carnivalesque festivity, the rise of manners, Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the alleged anti-Christian rituals of Jews and witches. This edition examines the impact on the European understanding of ritual from the discoveries of new civilizations in the Americas and missionary efforts in China and adds more material about rituals peculiar to women.
Author: Noah Millstone
Author: Noah Chaim Millstone
Author: Judith Maltby
Author: Kevin Sharpe
Author: J. P. Kenyon
Author: Thomas Cogswell
Author: Joanne Paul
Author: Kevin Sharpe
Author: Aysha Pollnitz
Author: Edward Muir