Early Modern England Research Articles

Renaissance Self-Fashioning after 44 Years: Hybridity, Conversos, Individuation, and littérature totale

Abstract While Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 book, Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, was methodologically innovative within the field of literary criticism, his work also grew from the roots of Jacob Burckhardt’s old cultural history, and his method of new historicism developed alongside the new cultural history. Although certain parts of Burckhardt’s arguments have been discarded, the work of Greenblatt and others has continued to build upon his foundation. Courtiership, anxiety, and the relationship between outward and interior identities, text and context, hybridity, and individuation are all useful concepts for constructing less monolithic understandings of early modern identities. With a European scale, this article traces early modern historiography and literary criticism from the nineteenth century to 2024 and introduces historical examples of identity formation from early modern England, France, Iberia, the Italian peninsula, and the Holy Roman Empire. The article reflects upon early modern examples of self-fashioning in the light of Burckhardt, the Annales, Greenblatt, and others who have contributed to our understanding of agency and identity up to the present day, arguing that these historians and literary scholars have worked together to answer questions that are fundamentally psychological in nature.

The Histrionics of Warrior Masculinity in <i>1 & 2 Tamburlaine</i> (1587)

This essay analyses the histrionics of warrior masculinity in 1 & 2 Tamburlaine in light of the social, political and technological shifts that transformed warfare in early modern England. It first looks at the contexts of these shifts and how they necessitated new models of masculinity in keeping with early modern civil society. The prospective elimination of the nobility’s warrior masculinity caused great anxieties about the foothold of masculinity in society more generally, which became a major subject of discussion in public discourse at the time. The early modern theatre, with its particular function in formulating topical issues and discussing questions about identities, staged the anxiety about effeminacy brought about by the demise of pre-modern warriorship. This essay, however, proposes that English Renaissance drama of war mediates the transition of the model manhood from that of martialism to that of civility. It argues that Christopher Marlowe’s 1 & 2 Tamburlaine, as a famous play centering on war and conquest, engages in such mediation through the hyperbolic characterisation of the pre-modern warrior. By doing so, it renders such a figure unhuman and thereby unviable in early modern society. The essay further analyses how the dramaturgy of the plays estranges the audience from the figure of pre-modern warrior and discredits its legitimacy.

Crying in the Womb: Emotions, Sound, and Personhood in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT Crying in the womb (vagitus uterinus) was an extraordinary phenomenon or prodigy by which a foetus in the later stages of gestation could be heard to cry before its birth. This article traces the way that crying in the womb in early modern England was consistently interpreted, across religious, medical, and popular texts, as an emotional expression. Hearing crying in the womb affirmed the unseen presence of a body and soul, already miserable with sin and able to convey this humanness, and affect the emotions of others, with the sound of its voice. This article reveals that hearing non-verbal emotional expressions was central to the early configuration of English Protestant personhood.

Spike Gibbs. Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp 280. $100.00 (cloth).

Spike Gibbs. Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp 280. $100.00 (cloth).

Patriarcapitalism? Towards an Intertwined History of Inheritance law and Capitalism from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution (c. 1350–1850)

Abstract This article examines the patriarchal nature of inheritance law in late medieval and early modern England, the existence of an aristocratic offensive in the field of law against women’s inheritance rights between the 14th and the 18th century, and the relation between this offensive and the rise of agrarian capitalism. It then investigates the favorable effects of this legal legacy on the accumulation and concentration of the means of agrarian, coal and industrial commodity production in the hands of a minority of male aristocrats and bourgeois who played a significant role in the making of the Industrial Revolution.

Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England: Visual Communication and the Royal Society. By Meghan C. Doherty

Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England: Visual Communication and the Royal Society. By Meghan C. Doherty

The Covenant with Moses and the Kingdom of God: Thomas Hobbes and the Theology of the Old Covenant in Early Modern England, written by Martin, Andrew J.

The Covenant with Moses and the Kingdom of God: Thomas Hobbes and the Theology of the Old Covenant in Early Modern England, written by Martin, Andrew J.

Women as child carers: Arranging and compensating mothering in early modern Lancashire

ABSTRACT This article uses a database of fifty petitions submitted to the Lancashire Quarter Session Courts between 1660 and 1720 to locate mothers who cared for non-kin children in early modern England. While boarding children with non-kin was a practice not unknown to historians, the identities and experiences of the women who provided the childcare have hitherto been largely absent from previous scholarships. These petitions were brought by women who were not receiving the appropriate or arranged financial compensation for their caring responsibilities. Through their descriptions of disorder in their arrangements, we can uncover not only the attributes of the carers and their lived experiences but also more broadly what early modern English society expected from them. In addition, these petitions allow for a deeper understanding of how the practice of boarding children operated within and without the confines of the poor laws. Given the importance of child-rearing and the belief that it was a female task, this mothering gave common women authority that would otherwise be less accessible to them. This article thus argues that women understood the wider significance of this labour and used the influence it offered them to their advantage in their petitions. More broadly, then, this article provides a re-examination of the relationship between women, the poor law and authority in early modern England.

Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England, by Urvashi Chakravarty

<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>, by Urvashi Chakravarty

Reclaiming Cross-Dressing: Masculinity Construction in the All-Female Yue Opera’s Shakespearean Adaptations

Because it offers the stage such scope for polyerotic interpretation, crossdressing has held an irresistible appeal to theatre practitioners across times and cultures, including Shakespeare in early modern England. The Shakespearean cross-dressing theatre, however, has long excited critical disapprobation as a cultural form which excluded women. However, can cross-dressing as a theatrical device be reclaimed by women as an alternative mode of Shakespearean performance? What academic and practical significance can a reversed, all-female casting of Shakespearean production offer? This paper will argue that the Chinese Yue opera’s Shakespeare adaptations may shed light on how gender impersonation can be used to express women’s wishes and desires. As the second largest Chinese opera genre, Yue opera is a theatreform in which all roles are played by actresses for a predominantly female audience. Interestingly, Shakespeare is also Yue opera’s most adapted foreign playwright. General Ma Long (2001, an adaptation of Macbeth) and Coriolanus and Duliniang (2016, an adaptation of Coriolanus) are two representative specimens of Yue opera Shakespearean adaptations with all-female casting. The male protagonists of both are played by cross-dressed actresses. How do Yue opera female performers, whose style is generally perceived as soft and feminine, stage the Shakespearean war heroes famous for their bloodthirsty masculinity? Deploying a theoretical framework based on Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory and Bertolt Brecht’s account of the epic theatre, this essay aims to examine the masculinity construction in the all-female Yue opera Shakespearean adaptations, in order to open a discussion of how cross-dressing can be used to deconstruct and reassemble gender norms.

Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain

Bad Blood: Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain

Reflections on 'Have we lost sleep?'

The article, 'Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England', Medical History, 67, 2 (2023), 91-108, by Niall Boyce is devoted to criticising my historical research pertaining to 1) the predominance of segmented sleep in the pre-industrial Western world and 2) the nineteenth-century transition of sleep to today's pattern of continuous slumber that most people in modern societies seek to achieve, albeit not always successfully. This response addresses Boyce's reinterpretation of the evidence and indicates whether this is erroneous or selective. My analysis thereby reasserts the predominanceof segmented sleep in pre-modern Western Europe. Boyce's assessment rests not on his original investigation of primary sources but on my first study relating to segmented sleep, published in 2001. Not least of the flaws of 'Have We Lost Sleep?' is its surprising inattention to my subsequent works that have expanded, modified, and bolstered this initial publication.

The Parliament of Birds and the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey: A Case Study of Political Allegory in Early Modern England

Abstract: This article identifies the significance of an early Tudor poem entitled The Parliament of Birds . This anonymous poem was most likely written and first published in around 1530, though the date could be as late as 1535. It combines two narratives, telling the story of a proud hawk and an upstart crow who are ultimately humbled by their king, the eagle. The article argues that this poem, which has received very little attention from scholars, is an allegory of the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry VIII’s chief minister, in 1529. The article thus provides a case study into the political use of allegorical poetry in early modern England.

The Two Pierides: Magpies and Imitative Poetics in Early Modern England

Abstract: Since antiquity, magpies have been known for their chattering call and their uncanny ability to mimic other sounds, including human speech. On this basis, the bird has by turns been maligned as a gossip, an impostor, and a hypocrite—and celebrated as an imitator. These opposed perspectives mutually inform influential accounts of the magpie, such as Ovid’s tale of the Pierides, in which the eloquent and ambitious daughters of King Pieros, who are equal in number to and even share names with the Muses, are turned into magpies after challenging the Muses to a singing contest and losing. In the early modern period, this ambivalent legacy worked against polemicists who sought to establish a clear distinction between chatter and speech through the invocation of the magpie. The black-and-white bird testified with equal conviction on either side of debates over gender, politics, and religion. Poets and critics faced a similar challenge in distinguishing poets from “pie-poets,” for the magpie spoke profoundly both to the presumption and to the transcendent promise of poetry as described by its most idealistic advocates. Tracking the magpie through early modern culture broadens our sense of the scope of early modern poetics, allowing us to appreciate how a range of writers understood imitation and how poets themselves felt about their attempts to participate in beauty through the imitation of nature and art.

The Ambiguities and Vagaries of Popular Control: Trust and Parochial Corruption in Early Modern England

Abstract Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and across Britain’s empire, the idea took hold that a public office was a fiduciary trust, with legally and rhetorically enforceable duties of accountability, selflessness, and duty of care. Coupled with a remarkably free press which enabled the exposure and pursuit of corrupt activity, and petitioning activity that put pressure on Parliament, this development fostered important ideas and practices of public accountability. Yet, as the second half of the article shows, these were often difficult to effect and sustain at the local level, especially in large urban parishes, where campaigners were sometimes able to mobilize popular support for anti-corruption investigations but also faced a degree of indifference that meant change and reform were protracted, patchy, and by no means certain. Thus, on the one hand, popular control—or perhaps better, popular accountability—advanced in conceptual, legal, and some practical ways; but on the other, in some circumstances it was difficult to implement and was blunted by a range of factors that limited popular pressure and worked against reform. This article thus problematizes a linear narrative of unfailing progress toward greater accountability, highlighting instead the variety of local experiences and the nature of anti-corruption as an ongoing process. Both the central state and the parish state faced similar challenges, albeit in different contexts.

Radical Thought and Political Practice: Officeholding and Accountability in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Abstract This article connects changes in administrative and bureaucratic processes that historians associate with state formation in early modern Britain with overlooked developments in thinking about political accountability. It blends the social history of state administration with intellectual history, and involves synoptic analysis as well as striking case studies. It argues that innovative political thinking emerged from new forms of political practice, and from the experiences of humble officials in the localities. Such individuals were increasingly professionalized and specialized, and their work was increasingly described using the language of trust, public interest, and state’s service. The mid-seventeenth century accentuated the process by which they came to be accountable to a centralized state, not least through the routinization and intensification of quotidian practices associated with enhanced communication between center and locality. Ultimately, the article argues that such processes, as well as more regular and direct interactions between political elites and humble officials, encouraged new kinds of political thinking. These were not quite unintended, but they may not have been fully anticipated either, and they involved innovative attempts to subject higher officials to oversight from “below,” and to legitimize their accountability to an adjudicating public, in ways that may even have had a lasting effect on English political culture.

Blind lives: the sightless and society in early modern England

ABSTRACT The historiography on blindness in the early modern period has focused almost entirely on the condition itself, rather than the lived experiences of the blind. It is often suggested that before the modern age it is impossible to access their lives. This article challenges that assumption. The evidence, though fragmentary, is far richer than has been supposed. The article shifts the focus to the blind themselves: their emotional responses, experiences and lives, and the impact on their families. It demonstrates how the experience of blindness was shaped by factors such as age, social status, gender, occupation, and the degree of disability. The well-to-do found ways to adapt, while the poor faced a desperate struggle to survive. The blind continued to live among their neighbours, and through recovering their experiences we also gain a more nuanced picture of social attitudes across the early modern period.

Brian P. Levack, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2023

Brian P. Levack, Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2023

Walking the Whinny-Moor: Corpse roads and pre-funeral death rituals in early modern England

Walking the Whinny-Moor: Corpse roads and pre-funeral death rituals in early modern England

Lodine-Chaffey, Jennifer Lillian. A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England

Lodine-Chaffey, Jennifer Lillian. A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England