Elizabethan and Jacobean England: sources and documents of the English Renaissance

Abstract

Elizabethan and Jacobean England: sources and documents of the English Renaissance, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, xxxvi + 718 pp., £136.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4051-4967-9Some might argue that it is rash to introduce a collection of documents from the Tudor and early Stuart period by invoking A. F. Pollard, a name that now does little more than to conjure images of a long-gone and not much lamented style of history, and one fairly closely associated with editions of key texts. Fortunately, the book under review is far from resembling the kind of anthologies that now seem to sit unloved, and gathering dust, on library shelves. The key to what makes this substantial volume more intriguing lies in its title, and although the term Renaissance may be a little odd for something that covers merely the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, and clearly refers to what in Britain would be called the early modern period, rather than to a cultural and intellectual phenomenon, it effectively signals an impressively wide-ranging body of material. Its 216 sources - or - are divided into six sections, dealing with government, religion, society, economy, learning and art, and each section is accompanied by a brace of brief but useful essays by leading scholars, Paul Hammer and Malcolm Smuts, Patrick Collinson and Donna Hamilton, Cathy Shrank and Catherine Richardson, Joan Thirsk and Bradley Rymer, Rebecca Bushnell and Colin Burrow, and finally Helen Wilcox and Gavin Alexander, respectively. The task of presenting the texts themselves, which appear to have been selected by the volume 's editor, has been executed efficiently, and with a fairly light touch, in order to provide clarificatory footnotes, rather than in-depth analysis.Of course, producing an edition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents that will please everyone is an almost impossible task, and there are some fairly obvious criticisms that could be made of this volume. It might be argued, for example, that there is too little on science, architecture and political thought. Moreover, perusing the section on government proves fairly revealing. It contains a variety of proclamations, homilies on obedience, royal speeches and parliamentary debates, and texts on issues such as rebellions, seditious books, war, Mary Queen of Scots, the Armada (including Elizabeth's Tilbury speech), Anglo-Scottish union and the Great Contract. But it is a body of material that might be thought to be somewhat conventional and familiar. Indeed, in this section, as throughout the volume, the documents are almost entirely readily available, in previous collections - including Tudor Royal Proclamations, Prothero's Select Statutes and Elton's Tudor Constitution, as well as Cressy and Ferrell's Religion and Society in Early Modern England - or on Early English Books Online. Many are probably available in other online versions. Only a tiny fraction of the readings seem to be new to this kind of anthology. And part of the danger is that this results in a selection that presents a rather traditional, perhaps even dated picture. It might have been interesting, for example, to include sources that have generated considerable historiographical interest in recent years, from the Bond of Association to the Swallowfield articles, as well as any number of sources that relate to the projection of authority, not least in terms of things like pageantry. …