History Of Early Modern England Research Articles

:Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England

Crime and law have now been studied by historians of early modern England for more than a generation. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England attempts to reach further than most conventional treatments of the subject, to explore the cultural contexts of law-breaking and criminal prosecution, and to recover their hidden social meanings. In this sense the book is more than just a 'history from below': it is a history from within. Conversely, the book explores crime to shed light on the long-term development of English mentalities in general. To this end, three serious crimes - witchcraft, coining and murder - are examined in detail, revealing new and important insights into how religious reform, state formation, secularisation, and social and cultural change (for example, the spread of literacy and the availability of print) may have transformed the thinking and outlook of most ordinary people between 1550 and 1750.

Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England

This fascinating book - the first comprehensive study of reading and politics in early modern England - examines how texts of that period were produced and disseminated and how readers interpreted and were influenced by them. Based on the voluminous reading notes of one gentleman, Sir William Drake, the book shows how readers formed radical social values and political ideas as they experienced civil war, revolution, republic and restoration. By analysing the strategies of Drake's reading practices, as well as those of several key contemporaries (including Jonson, Milton and Clarendon), Kevin Sharpe demonstrates how reading in the rhetorical culture of Renaissance England was a political act. He explains how Drake, for example, by reading and rereading classical and humanist works of Tacitus, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Bacon, became the advocate of dissimulation, intrigue and realpolitik. Authority, Sharpe argues, was experienced, reviewed and criticised not only in the public forum but in the study, on the page and in the imagination, of early modern readers. 'Erudite, intelligent and fascinating ...a wonderful study of a subject central to the intellectual and cultural history of early modern England. ' Anthony Grafton Kevin Sharpe was director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of 'The Personal Rule of Charles I', 'Selling the Tudor Monarchy' and 'Image Wars', all published by Yale University Press.

Women and the Irish chancery court in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

SCOTTISH OR BRITISH? POLITICS AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN SCOTLAND, c. 1500–1707 The true law of kingship: concepts of monarchy in early-modern Scotland. By J. H. Burns. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+315. £37.50. ISBN 0-19-820384-5. Politics, religion and the British revolutions: the mind of Samuel Rutherford. By John Coffey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+304. £40. ISBN 0-521-58172-9. Scots

Is the development of a new British history of the early modern period a boon or a bane for those interested in the history of Scotland (or, for that matter, Ireland, Wales, even England)? Such a false antithesis we might normally confine to our examination papers; but it is difficult to avoid considering it after reading the five books under review here. Professor Burns has written a superb account of Scottish political thought in the long sixteenth century and Dr Coffey an equally successful exploration of the mind of the leading ideologist of the Covenanters. The collection edited by Dr Mason, which connects with the Burns study at several points, is explicitly a view of Scottish political thought focused on the Union of 1603, while that edited by Dr Robertson drops the particular emphasis on Scottish thought in its exploration of the intellectual context to the Union of 1707. Professor Speck presents us with a slightly different problem: a volume in a series on the history of early modern England that takes as the central theme of English politics in the decade 1700–10 the birth of Britain. Each of these books is rewarding, at the very least ; together their effect may be disquieting.

Conflict Resolution and Patronage in Provincial Towns, 1590–1640

Historians of early modern England, just like the people they study, are preoccupied with order and disorder. Particularly for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, attention has focused on how a government and political nation whose prescriptions demanded unanimity and stability descended into civil war and revolution, the ultimate disorder. The period saw rising populations, social mobility, economic change, and religious division, all of which placed stress on the traditional order. These agents of turmoil deserve close attention. But in focusing so intently on breakdown, we tend to miss seeing how Elizabethan and early Stuart government actually worked. For most of these years, a reasonably stable and increasingly integrated royal government ruled peacefully over the English people. By shifting our attention away from breakdown, we can begin to ask critical new questions. How, precisely, did the leaders of this society work to create order in the face of difference? How did the nature of government affect the ways that people sought stability?Evidence from urban government—provincial borough corporations—provides critical insight into these questions. Civic leaders found that the best way to maintain order and authority in their own communities was by participating in the wider governing structures of the state. London's attempts at the “pursuit of stability” have received serious treatment in recent years. Provincial towns, however, have less often been studied as a means to understand the polity as a whole. They have in the past been characterized as quite insular, either abjectly dependent on a great lord or gentleman or else “independent” and unwilling to brook outside influences; they sought stability and control by looking inward, reinforcing their own authority.

George Herbert's Country Parson and the Enclosure of Professional Fields

George Herbert's Country Parson and the Enclosure of Professional Fields by Ronald W. Cooley The study of professions and professional discourses has become increasingly important to historians and literary historians of early modern England, professionals who are themselves jockeying for position on the boundary between adjacent disciplines. The skeptical response of many historians to literary "New Historicism," with its heavy reliance on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, illustrates both the late-twentieth-century professional jostling, and the need for further research into professions and professionalism. HistorianDavid Cressy has insisted that to think of Stuart England in Foucault's terms, "to argue from France to England, and from the 1780s to the 1610s, is an exercise in anachronism and dislocation," largely because early modern England lacked the professional and bureaucratic machinery to implement the sort of "panoptic" system of social control Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.1 Such a position depends, at least in part, on the prevailing view that the rise of professions is closely linked to the beginnings of urbanization and industrialization in eighteenth-century England.2 But many historians of early modern England have challenged this view in the last fifteen years or so, exploring the training, practice, and social role of the emerging professions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in rural as well as urban areas.3 It seems increasingly clear that if early modern England had not developed the professions as instruments of social control, it was in the process of doing so. If this point is implied by the emergence of "semi-independent professional hierarchies" as an increasingly prominent feature of the English social order, it is confirmed by the sweeping ambitions registered in professional handbooks like George Herbert's A Priest to The Temple, or, The Country Parson His Character, andRule ofHoly Life!' At one point in the book, Herbert declares that "The Countrey Parson desires to be all to his Parish, and not only a Pastour, but a Lawyer also, and a Phisician."5 The statement is part of a web of allusions to, and borrowings from, the burgeoning early modern discourse of callings and professions, the raw material out of which Herbert fashions his portrait of an idealized rural clergyman.6 Indeed 2 Ronald W. Cooley the book implicitly remarks on its own composition when Herbert writes that The Country Parson is full of all knowledg. They say, it is an ill Mason that refuseth any stone: and there is no knowledg, but, in a skilfull hand, serves either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge, (p. 228) Herbert puts his precept into practice, employing his knowledge of law and medicine, "to illustrate some other knowledge," in this case the knowledge of "the Dignity . . . and the Duty" (p. 225) of a parish clergyman in the Church of England. But Herbert's reliance on legal and medical terminology does more than demonstrate his facility for similitudes. The analogies and distinctions between the priest, the physician, and the lawyer register The Country Parson's participation in a complex struggle for professional and discursive territory. A sense of the book's audience and of the social forces that helped to produce it is important here. The Country Parson is often read through the lens of the Civil War, as an idyllic portrait of the golden age in the Church of England. Completed in 1632, and surely intended for an audience of contemporaries, the book was published in Herbert's Remains in 1652, almost two decades after Herbert's death. Needless to say, a great deal had changed in the religious life of England in these two decades. The 1652 volume, and the second edition of 1671, contained prefatory material by Barnabus Oley, an ejected Laudian clergyman. Oley's nostalgia has colored subsequent responses to the text, though ironically, as Daniel Doerksen has shown, it was probably Oley's "Arminian party . . . that prevented the publication of The Country Parson much earlier, say in 1639."7 If we move beyond Laudian nostalgia and consider the forces shaping Herbert's sense of the Church of England in the 1620s and early 1630s, we can begin to see The Country...

Men's Dilemma: The Future of Patriarchy in England 1560–1660

PATRIARCHY was very old when Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne. Historians have sought its origins in die Old Testament record of the creation of Jewish monotiieism and in the social conditions of Hebrew society. They have explored die contributions of classical Greece and early Christian thinking to its development and evolution. By the time that the Tudor dynasty ruled in England, the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in die family and die extension of diat subordination to women in society in general, die scriptural patriarchy with which I am concerned, had become so deeply embedded diat it has appeared immutable. Something so permanent, something that was so given, has seemed not to deserve scrutiny by die historians of early modern England. It was socialist and radical feminists who took up die notion of patriarchy in die 1960s because they needed a concept which would help diem to theorise male dominance. From dieir contemporary perspective also, patriarchy appeared immovable and monumental. There was a tendency among them at first to study it as such: feminist historians approached die past wim die premise diat there has always been an undifferentiated and consistent male commitment to domination and control over women in every sphere of life. The conflation of patriarchy with misogyny, I suggest, produced an unhistorical patriarchy as die staple of women's history. It is only fairly recendy diat historical studies of gender have broken free from diese shackles, diat historians have begun to penetrate die discourses and strategies dirough which men have—or have not— coerced, or oppressed or subordinated women through die ages.

The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560-1765.

This is the first intensive study of an industrial community in early modern England. Whickham, a village built on an underground mountain of coal in north-east England, was arguably Britain's first modern industrial society. David Levine and Keith Wrightson employ the latest techniques of socio-historical research and make full use of a wide variety of contemporary sources to explore many aspects of life in Whickham between 1560 and 1765. They bring together vital strands - including industrial development, agrarian change, social stratification, demography, religion, work, leisure, living standards, kinship and the family - to produce a rounded and vivid picture, which throws into relief the achievements, benefits, and costs of the complex process of industrialization. The development of Whickham is set in the larger context of socio-economic change during this period. This is a major contribution to the history of early modern England.

The Correction Court in the Diocese of Carlisle, 1704–1756

Many twentieth-century historians of early modern England have assumed that ecclesiastical jurisdication was a lost cause after the Restoration, and thus, in contrast to earlier periods, there has been little research on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. However, an examination of the Correction Court records for the Diocese of Carlisle between 1704 and 1758 and a summary survey of other dioceses suggest that such archives may prove useful for historians. This article uses the Carlisle Correction Court archive to study the charges which were brought to the court in the first half of the eighteenth century and, after a brief description of the social and economic setting, looks at the characteristics of the people brought to book.

The Enclosure of English Social History

It is now roughly a quarter of a century since the proponents of a new social history of early modern England offered students of the period a novel agenda and an unprecedented opportunity. Prior to the 1960s social history had been variously understood as the history of everyday life, of the lower classes and popular movements, or as a junior partner in the relatively recently-established firm of economic and social history (occupied in the main with the study of social institutions and social policy). As such, it had produced more than a few pioneering works of outstanding quality and lasting value (some of them about to enjoy a revived recognition after decades of relative neglect). But it was not a field close to the centre of historical preoccupation. It was at best contextual, at worst residual.From the early 1960s, however, came a call for a social history of a new type, one conceived as the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them and gives them meaning. The new agenda was deeply influenced by the social sciences and envisaged an ever closer relationship with sociology, social anthropology and demography. Peter Laslett wrote of ‘sociological history’ or ‘historical sociology’ and Keith Thomas of the need for a ‘more systematic indoctrination’ in the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences. As applied to history, all this was both radical and liberating. In the face of an established curriculum which appeared in many respects restrictive and in some dessicated, it proposed a massive and necessary broadening and deepening of historical concern: the creation of a range of historical enquiry appropriate to the preoccupations and understandings of the late twentieth century.