Abstract
An earlier tradition of writing about early modern English protest conceptualized the early modern crowd as ‘pre-political’ and its objectives as instrumental and backward-looking. These conceptualizations reflected in part a silent re-definition of the political as concerned with high politics, and they failed to recognize that in a period of accelerated social and economic change what we might term ‘the politics of nostalgia’ could offer a radical threat. More recent work, drawing on a re-conceptualization of the political in social theory as concerned with how power was constituted and contested in social spaces from the family outwards, has emphasized that early modern protests were necessarily political.1 Early modern English protesters demonstrated a sometimes surprising depth of knowledge of the political system within which they operated and the way the transcripts of the state and a social elite might be appropriated to fashion and legitimize protest.
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