Officers and Office-Holding at the English Court: A Study of the Chapel Royal, 1485–1547

The European cities were the most important institutions, including the complex social, economic, political, and cultural systems of relationships. They evaluated the increase in medieval corporations and interaction with the English court. Besides this, the European cities were the stage for the ritualized form of publicity. Royal entrances, initiation ceremonies, processions, and carnivals emphasized power relations. The performances reflected the legitimization of the royal power and its prestige. They demonstrated the status of corporations in the social system. The scripts included mythical and biblical allegories and consisted of the specific order of the actions and logic of staging. The scenic elements are based on space, social hierarchy, and philosophy. This article examines urban processions and festivities in sixteenth-century London based on city chronicles and civic calendars from the Tudor period. A cultural-anthropological approach is applied to explore the structure and symbolism of royal wedding processions, the inauguration ceremonies of the Lord Mayor, and theatrical masques within the urban space. Although these public celebrations trace their roots to medieval traditions, under the Tudors, they acquired features of triumphal spectacles. Special attention is given to the wedding entry of Catherine of Aragon in 1501, interpreted through the lens of Arnold van Gennep’s concept of rites of passage. This approach highlights the transformation of the bride's social status and her integration into the English royal court. The Lord Mayor’s inauguration is analyzed through its social, economic, and legal dimensions, revealing the vassal–seigneurial relationship between the City of London and the Crown. The evolution of royal masques is discussed in the developments at the Tudor court. These public rituals not only showcase the rich culture of Tudor London but also reflect the social hierarchy and worldview of both its citizens and the nobility.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, musicians were largely dependent for their livelihoods upon either the goodwill of royal or noble patronage or regular employment by a municipality or the Church. A gradual emancipation subsequently took place, due to the growth of public concerts and operatic performances, and substantial developments in music printing and publishing. The first public opera house was opened only in 1637 and the first public concerts did not take place until the late seventeenth century. The earliest and most consistent patron of music was the Church, although at first it was concerned more with composition – and with vocal rather than instrumental music. Most of the royal and aristocratic families kept a musical establishment as part of their state and were therefore of vital importance to musicians. The enormous development of instrumental forms and styles during the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost entirely associated with court and aristocratic support. There were, for example, over three hundred states and courts in Germany; these provided musicians with more opportunities for employment than in France, where there were few, or in England, where there was only one. As with the violin, Italy was undoubtedly the birthplace of the cello; and it was employed increasingly as a solo instrument during the seventeenth century. The first known executant and composer for the instrument was Domenico Gabrielli from Bologna. His contemporary Petronio Franceschini, employed at San Petronio, Bologna, encouraged composers to write specifically for the cello, and he was also one of the founders of the Accademia Filarmonica.

A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

This paper describes the cut and construction of the doublet and hose worn as underdress to the robes and insignia of the Knights of the Most Noble Order of the Garter at the English Court under Charles II. This example belonged to Charles Stuart, sixth Duke of Lennox and third Duke of Richmond (1639–1672), who was created a knight of the Garter in 1661. It is interesting on several counts: the dominant textile is a very pure cloth of silver; the elaborate hose are constructed with reference to earlier seventeenth-century models; the garments exemplify Charles II’s understanding of the importance of ceremony to successful kingship. The suit was conserved for an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the essay gives some account of discoveries made through this process. In addition, the garments are placed in the context of late seventeenth- century dress.

The Types and Meanings of the Orchid Paintings on Craftwork in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: With a Focus on the Inner Cases for Books Made of Jade, White Porcelains with Underglaze Iron-brown Painting and Blue and White Porcelains

THE BRITISH Parliament only reforms English arbitration legislation at intervals exceeding one hundred years; and the intermediate landscape since the late seventeenth century is littered with the rubble of good intentions. It seems therefore untimely that, within ten years, attempts are already being made to amend the Arbitration Act 1996. It also seems surprising, given that the 1996 Act was drafted (and redrafted) after unprecedented consultations with arbitration users and practitioners from 1985 to 1996, extending far beyond the UK Government's Departmental Advisory Committee on Arbitration (DAC). This was the broad consensus reached by many participants at the IFSL's Conference last December, organised by the LCIA, to mark the 1996 Act's tenth birthday, from which two thoughtful papers are reproduced in this issue from arbitrators from abroad well acquainted with London arbitration. Moreover, with much relief and no little acclaim, the House of Lords had only recently confirmed the 1996 Act as a fresh spirit in the law and practice of English arbitration, re-striking a new balance in the relations between parties, legal representatives, arbitrators and the English Court – with the latter's role significantly reduced [ Lesotho v Impregilo [2006] 1 AC 221). All this is to be contrasted, however, with the reaction from certain quarters to the Harris Report, also reproduced in this issue with a critique from another well-known commentator from abroad. There are two principal causes. The first is section 67 of the 1996 Act, about which all that can be said has been said (and more). The second and more significant is section 69 of the 1996 Act permitting parties, under strict conditions, to appeal from an award on a question of English substantive law. It is, of course, an old issue of great historical significance in the history of English arbitration. Section 69, in …

This article demonstrates how the state ruling system transformed in the early modern Central Asian steppe by scrutinizing the political history of the Dörböds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the early period of the Four Oirad Confederation, Dalai Taishi─the head prince of the Dörböd aristocratic house and the lord of the Dörböd principality─was a core constituent of the Four Oirad Confederation, maintaining a political and military alliance with his fellow Oirad princes. Following the death of Dalai Taishi, the Dörböd house and its principality continued to function as a principal member of the Four Oirad Confederation despite the rise of two factions within the royal family. Thus, during the period of the Four Oirad Confederation, the Dörböd house and principality retained independent power as well as a huge domain in today’s northern Kazakh steppe. In the late seventeenth century, the Zunghar principality gained ascendancy and developed into an empire in the Central Asian steppe. With the dramatic rise of Zunghar power and influence, the Dörböd house lost its previous status as an independent ruler of the Dörböd principality and an equal ally of Zunghar princes, being demoted to subordinate nobles of the Zunghar supreme ruler. This transition of the Dörböd house’s political status clarifies that the state ruling system of the early modern Central Asian steppe changed from a decentralized confederated state system based on the Oirad aristocracy into a centralized imperial system based on the Zunghar autocracy.

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

This article considers the formation of archival funds about Austro-Russian relations in the late seventeenth century in one of the four departments of the Austrian State Archives (the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv of the Habsburgs). The analysis demonstrates that the archival funds formed alongside the development of the archive’s structure. The sources referred to include documents dedicated to the foreign policy contacts of the Habsburg dynasty with Russia in the late seventeenth century. The authors focus on the period when, because of the Ottoman threat, interactions between Vienna and Moscow intensified, which manifested itself in the active exchange of embassies and correspondence. The authors reveal the main type of structure of the archival funds mentioned. The collection contains several types of historical sources, among which the authors single out official letters (der Brief), instructions (die Instruktion) for Viennese representatives sent to Moscow, authentications (die Beglaubigung), decrees, minutes of audiences, envoy accounts (der Gesandtenbericht), and reports (der Bericht) of the Viennese envoys in Moscow. The characterisation of archival documents by fund and type demonstrates the deep research potential of the sources. The authors reveal that despite the long development and numerous military conflicts that influenced the preservation of the funds, the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv are an institution of supranational importance, accumulating the historical heritage of Austria and Russia. The archive department contains a large array of documents shedding light on various aspects of diplomatic relations between Vienna and Moscow in the second half of the seventeenth century, making possible a comprehensive study of Habsburg contacts with Russia. This makes it necessary to consider introducing the source base into scholarly circulation.

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father wasthecenter of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.

A lack of confidence in English law courts first arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the corruption of justice in outlying regions of the country. Reforms undertaken by the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII helped to restore trust in the legal process, but distrust arose once again during the personal rule of Charles I and among law reformers in the 1640s and 1650s. Distrust of English law courts reached a peak in the late seventeenth century in reaction to the coercion of juries and the violation of defendants’ rights in trials of Whigs and religious dissenters. Other sources of judicial distrust in late seventeenth-century England and the early American republic were the procedures in treason trials, which resulted in the unfair prosecution of opponents of the government. The harshness and unfairness of punishments for all crimes also eroded faith in the entire criminal justice system in both Britain and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Medical Directories and Medical Specialization in France, Britain, and the United States George Weisz (bio) This paper explores two subjects. It is in the first instance concerned with medical directories, a genre of professional literature that is utilized occasionally as a historical source but whose historical development is only beginning to be charted. 1 The essay deals in addition with medical specialization, about which a great deal has been written. By focusing on the treatment of specialization in medical directories, I hope to cast new light on both topics. More specifically, medical directories allow us to approach specialization at a systemic level and from a comparative perspective, supplementing the more usual emphasis on case studies of individual specialties. In two previous papers, I utilized medical directories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to analyze the evolution of specialist categories and populations in Paris and the largest provincial [End Page 23] cities of France. 2 In this essay, I propose to compare the treatment of specialization in French directories with that of comparable publications in the United States and Britain. I shall begin by briefly describing the emergence and proliferation of medical directories in the three countries. I shall then examine how different directories dealt with the spread of medical specialization. Finally, I shall offer some quantitative data based on the information contained in the major national directories during the interwar period. In offering such comparative data, I do not suggest that the recapitulation of these results is unproblematic. In previous studies, I have emphasized the volatility and ambiguity of specialty status in the early twentieth century. The quantification of data from directories is difficult enough within one country, and the problems are compounded when we attempt international comparisons because different national directories approach specialization in distinctive ways. Such variations, however, themselves yield valuable insights into the nature and meaning of specialization in the countries involved. The Medical Directory The medical directory is a curious genre with a complex literary pedigree. One precurser is the astrological almanac, itself a successor to the medieval computus manuscript, which might contain all sorts of practical information including lists of professionals. 3 As directories developed, they frequently retained the most characteristic feature of the almanac, the calendar. Until the 1870s, the British Medical Directory contained an [End Page 24] elaborate calendar including information about the phases of the moon, times of sunrise and sunset, days of meetings of scientific societies, historical anniversaries, days of religious significance, and days for renewing fire insurance, paying taxes, or voting in county elections. Long before they abandoned calendars, directories had become primarily concerned with the representation not of time but of social space. As social life became increasingly complex from the seventeenth century on, individuals required practical guides to the intricate patchwork of institutions, groups, and persons that constituted their society. By the late seventeenth century there existed several different sorts of directories appearing at more or less regular intervals. One important category described the major elite institutions and corporations of the nation, ranging from the royal family and state officials to lists of professionals like physicians, notaries, and lawyers; the Almanach royal, which appeared in France from 1699 until the twentieth century, and Debrett’s Royal Kalendar (1765–1893) in Britain were among the most successful publications of this type. A second category, whose origins in Britain go back to lists of guild merchants of the fourteenth century, were trade and business directories, which especially proliferated in Britain. 4 In the late eighteenth century, directories devoted to specific professional groups began appearing sporadically. Medical directories appeared in France as early as 1776, 5 and in Britain as early as 1779. 6 But it was not until the nineteenth-century emergence of large-scale publishing enterprises that medical directories began to proliferate. In France, two directories began appearing on something like an annual basis during the 1820s. One of these, the Almanach général de médecine (founded in 1827) managed to survive in various forms until [End Page 25] World War I. 7 It was joined in the next decades by a variety of other publications. Some were highly idiosyncratic, like Henri Meding’s Paris...

KATHAKALI: KOTTAYAM PLAYS. International Video Edition (DVD). A Vedika Presentation. E-mail: . Web site: . Recording format: Beta. Complete set of four plays (9 DVDs): $400. Individual plays: $100 each. Plays: Baka Vadham (The killing of Baka); Kirmira Vadham (The killing of Kirmira); Kalyana Saugandhikam (The auspicious flower); Kalakeya Vadham (The killing of Kalakeya). Vedika, nonprofit group based in Thrissur, Kerala (southern India), which promotes Kerala's traditional arts through workshops, seminars, performances, publications, and video documentation, has released four major kathakali plays on set of nine DVDs. While the domestic edition was released in January 2003, an international edition will be released in early 2004--of which preliminary version is reviewed here. The plays were recorded before an invited audience in Thrissur, Kerala, in September 2002. Perhaps the greatest single contribution of the international edition, unique thus far among the available video and film documentations of kathakali, is the inclusion of scrolling narrative text and voice-over in English introducing each scene, as well as extensive English subtitles used during the actual performance. These valuable additions enable English-speaking viewers of kathakali as well as students and scholars to deepen their understanding and appreciation of how such highly performative genre expresses the poetic conceits and literary references that are rife in the form. I applaud these unobtrusive captions that can only serve to further our understanding of such rich and complex performance genre. Vedika has wisely chosen to document what are arguably the four most important plays in the entire kathakali repertoire: The Killing of Baka, The Killing of Kirmira, The Flower of Good Fortune, and The Killing of Kalakeya. These plays were composed sometime in the late seventeenth century by the famous Kerala king and man of arts and letters Kottayam Thampuran, and they remain the backbone of kathakali training and performance to this day. With the use of subtitles, English-speaking viewers can finally appreciate Thampuran's highly poetic and literary writing. The Kerala scholars behind Vedika, led by Mundoli V. Narayanan (professor of literature at Miyazaki International College, Japan), have also produced an extensive booklet that accompanies the international edition. The booklet is multi-purposed, but one of its primary intents is to introduce the reader to the playwright who was the first great kathakali reformer in the early days of its development. Kottayam Thampuran hailed from royal family and served as king of northern Kerala principality. From early on, Thampuran was exposed to literature and the arts. He made many important contributions to kathakali, introducing for the first time episodes from the Mahabharata. Until this point, all the plays were drawn from the Ramayana and revolved around the deeds of the gods. These earlier plays centered on single character displays and were very one-dimensional. Narayanan suggests that they were no more than a costume dance accompanied by music (pp. 7-8). Thampuran added depth and emotional complexity to his characters that was not there before and turned kathakali into total theatre that blended all the elements of acting, dance, vocal music, and instrumental music. In Thampuran's masterful hands, the epic characters evolved throughout the story rather than appearing as unchanging constants as they had prior to his work. Thampuran was also instrumental in giving his female characters multidimensionality of moods and states of minds. His plays offered new challenges to the actor in terms of further codifying facial expressions and expanding the musical and rhythmic possibilities and the emotional states that could be expressed. The booklet also provides general timeline of kathakali's early evolution from ramanattom, and contains primer on kathakali with an illustrated list of the mudras (hand gestures) and their various meanings and glossary of terms. …

IntroductionPerformance and the Paper Stage, 1640–1700 Emma Depledge (bio) and Rachel Willie (bio) the second half of the seventeenth century was marked by attempts to limit access to the London theaters and by important developments in the trade in playbooks.1 The public theaters were closed when civil war broke out in 1642, and they remained closed for eighteen years. The punishments for performing plays during the ban were severe; as ordinances for theater closure state, punitive measures included the confiscation of profits and costumes, public whipping, arrests, and fines for audience members.2 The theaters were reopened shortly after the monarchy was restored in 1660, but only two playhouses were licensed for performance in London for most of the period 1660–1700, with their managers—William Davenant (Duke's Company) and Thomas Killigrew (King's Company)—to "suffer no rival companies."3 This was further reduced to just one theater from 1682 to 1695, and admission prices radically increased in comparison to the Elizabethan and Jacobean outdoor playhouses.4 Thus, although Restoration is used frequently to describe the supposedly simultaneous return of the monarchy and the theaters, for [End Page 1] many Londoners, the licensed theaters remained as inaccessible after 1660 as they had been during the ban on acting. As this special issue demonstrates, although state officials attempted to control when, where, and by whom theater could be produced and consumed, late seventeenth-century actors, managers, and audiences continuously sought out ways to defy the authorities and, in so doing, maintained a vibrant theatrical culture. Theater historians used to portray 1642–59 as a period in which theater became limited, elitist, and inert, but work by scholars including Janet Clare, Dale B. J. Randall, Rachel Willie, and Susan Wiseman has demonstrated that these years were instead marked by theatrical innovation, particularly in print culture as a dramatic form.5 Davenant (1606–1668) sought to circumvent the ban on stage plays by developing innovative methods of theatrical performance and by persuading the authorities to allow him to perform "moral entertainments," as exemplified by his Siege of Rhodes (1656), which contained recitative and other elements associated with the court masque and the development of English opera. An underground theater market also developed, in which new dramatic genres such as drolls, play ballads, play pamphlets, and dialogues, as well as the continued practice of dumb shows and dramatic commonplacing, helped to keep theatrical culture alive. These novel pieces were short and could be performed quickly to avoid detection by soldiers, or else they could be delivered privately without the need of professional actors or purposebuilt performance venues.6 There is evidence to suggest that these dramatic forms continued to flourish after 1660. In the early 1680s, the London-based playwright Elkanah Settle decided it would be expedient to take "one Coish [coach] & severall others to act some playes or Drolls in the citty of Yorke."7 As this example shows, performances took place beyond the capital, in York and also in places such as Norwich and "Sturbridge Fair" in Cambridge.8 Thus, it is important to recognize that [End Page 2] surreptitious performances took place during the midcentury ban on acting and that theater culture extended beyond the two patent theaters licensed to perform from the 1660s. Further, it is imperative to speak of theater histories in the plural to reflect the coexistence of state-sanctioned and underground theater culture as well as London and countrywide performances across the late seventeenth century. Actors and the Ban on Acting Prior to the ban on acting, in 1629, a French acting troupe performed at the Blackfriars playhouse. Their company followed Continental European practices and comprised female players, who met with a negative reception despite being admired at the English court.9 Evidently, English playgoers were not ready to experience women acting on the professional stage. Yet in 1656, Davenant obtained special permission to produce The Siege of Rhodes and cast Catherine Coleman to sing and act the part of Ianthe; it was first performed in the dining room of Davenant's home at Rutland House before transferring to the Cockpit theater in Drury Lane. Davenant was casting not only a female...

Reviewed by: Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry Peter Degabriele Melissa Mowry, Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 250; 3 illus. $80.00 cloth. Melissa Mowry's Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History follows the traces of a non-elite communal practice of hermeneutics and a collectivist politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary history. The book has five chapters, the first of which functions as an introduction, as well as a short but provocative coda. Throughout, Mowry looks to the Levellers as the positive articulation of a collective hermeneutics that she claims has been buried by the standard narrative of the rise of liberal individualism, and she argues that the political and literary history of the period she examines should be reconceived as a consistent attempt to eradicate this collectivism in favor of a conservative individualism. This is in stark contrast to the conventional narrative of early eighteenth-century political and literary history which argues that an individualist ideology produced a new liberal and anti-absolutist politics. For Mowry, by contrast, the theater of the Restoration and early novels by Defoe worked tirelessly to disavow the possibility of collectivist thought and politics. This refraction of the traditional narrative throws up some surprising and enlightening results. The Tory Aphra Behn and the dissenting Whig Daniel Defoe, for instance, are, in Mowry's account, engaged in the same political project of anti-collectivism rather than existing on opposite sides of a partisan political spectrum. This new lens thus reorients our vision of this period and stands as a profound challenge to conventional ways of understanding the relation of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature to political ideology. Collective Understanding models a new form of literary criticism that Mowry terms collective hermeneutics. Mowry's reading of the Leveller tradition in the second chapter of the book demonstrates this practice by paying attention to the ways in which texts "articulate relationships rather than statements/principles/ideas, or even identities" (13). This method allows Mowry to recover the contribution of Leveller women to the political praxis of the group, and to demonstrate the way Leveller texts worked by producing affective relationships. These relationships, Mowry argues, are the very basis of political association for the Levellers, a communal political thought that forthrightly challenges the sovereign exceptionalism being developed contemporaneously by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Mowry argues that instead of a popular sovereignty that would grant "the commonalty the sovereign power of exceptionalism," the Levellers claimed "a more fluid and socially grounded account of authority, stabilized through the affective bonds of collectivity" (57). Mowry deftly recovers this theory of association by her method of reading Leveller writings, a process in which instead of focusing on ideas or individual authorship, she follows traces of collective and social production of texts, from authorship, to printing, to distribution. The claim that Mowry makes through her practice is a significant one: that the kind of liberal, individualist criticism we are accustomed to practice makes it impossible for us to see the very collectivity characteristic of the Leveller movement, and that only a changed critical practice can recover a communitarian and sociable politics. The final three chapters of Collective Understanding focus not so much on tracing the positive development of a collectivist politics, as on finding the remnants of this collectivism in literary and ideological works that are determined [End Page 484] to erase it. Chapter 3 argues that attending to the work of William Davenant and Aphra Behn can demonstrate that "the royalist push to regain cultural authority over the late seventeenth century" enlisted literature to "secure the value and cultural centrality of exceptionalism and singularity" (129). Mowry thus reads the Restoration period as an ideological battle between an alliance of sovereignty and singularity against collectivism. The most interesting account of this battle comes in Mowry's readings of Behn's rewriting of the history of Bacon's rebellion in The Widdow Ranter. The play, for Mowry, is an "indictment of collectivity" (123) in which the "aggregated authority of the first-hand accounts" on which Behn's (and others') knowledge of the...