Late Tudor England Research Articles

‘Needful Woe’: Tragedy, King John and the Gods

Religious interpretations of Shakespeare's King John (1595–96) have emphasised the play's various forms of involvement in the doctrinal and sectarian debates of late Tudor England. This article draws on Walter Benjamin's notion of Trauerspiel, or mourning-play, to reassess these religious concerns. Shakespeare's aesthetics of lamentation is understood as the expression of a religiously informed idea of historical experience. The play stresses its characters' anxieties in their attempts to attune their faith in an all-governing providence to a historical condition characterised by ignorance, misrecognition and despair. Grief becomes the allegorical vehicle channelling the play's representation of the effects of historical catastrophe.

The ethics of dental practice in London in the sixteenth century. 1. Henry Chettle's Kind-Harts dreame of 1592. An important lay view.

Kind-Harts dreame (Fig. 1) is one of the proto-novels which first appeared in the Elizabethan age of literary wonders. It recounts the dream of the hero - a tooth-drawer (Kind-Hart) - who encounters the shades of five recently deceased characters, each of whom had been a famous star of their day in the London scene. Although short, and with medicine and dentistry occupying only part of the tale, the story contains invaluable detailed information about dental care in late Tudor England as observed by a layman. It is also an amusing read.

Reformation Christianity. Edited by Peter Matheson Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England. By Peter Iver Kaufman The Theology of William Tyndale. By Ralph S. Werrell

Reformation Christianity. Edited by Peter Matheson Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England. By Peter Iver Kaufman The Theology of William Tyndale. By Ralph S. Werrell

Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (review)

Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (review)

The Pastoral Use of the Book of Revelation in Late Tudor England

Over the past forty years historians have demonstrated continued interest in tracing the development of radical early modern English apocalypticism. The Tudor and Stuart eschatological scene, however, encompassed more than just millenarian activism. This article emphasises the pastoral ends to which Revelation was used by a group of late sixteenth-century writers as they sought to make it accessible to the ‘common sort’ of Christian. Viewing interest in the Last Days through this pastoral lens highlights both the tense complexities present in the Elizabethan Church and the usefulness of eschatological themes in studying ordinary and normative aspects of religious experience.

:Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England

Historians are usually more intrigued by what was than by what might have been. It is not surprising, then, that a relatively tame Elizabethan puritanism has been deposited within the mainstream of English Protestantism while some radical schemes, or what Peter Kaufman refers to as the what might have been, are more or less overlooked. Thinking of the Laity features fresh evidence that the advocates of broadly participatory parish regimes publicly confronted their critics. It collects shards of the expectations and regrets that survive in a few petitions, in manuscript records of university controversy, and in the recollections of proponents of lay and local control. Kaufman argues that to assemble these fragments is to recover thinking about the laity that gave revolutionary force to late Tudor puritanism. Elizabethan reformers, especially the most outspoken puritans, accused English Catholics of expound[ing] ecclesia to be a state opposite unto, and severed from the laitie. Kaufman concentrates on the identity and aspirations of these reformers who sought to remedy the severing of the church from its people by instituting the extraordinarily controversial solution of lay involvement in parish elections and in disciplining delinquents. Opponents of the reformers perceived the participatory initiatives as a threat to order and clerical authority, and opposed experiments with laicization, democratization, and local control. By the late 1580s the Puritans had lost their fight, but the debate was both lively and public, and as Kaufman deftly and persuasively reminds us, the roads not taken are still important parts of the historic landscape. Thinking of the Laity adds to our understanding of the policy debates closely associated with the origins of puritanism, presbyterianism, and congregationalism. This book will be essential reading for people interested in the history of early modern England and in the progress of sixteenth-century religious reform.

:Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England

:Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England

Thinking of the laity in late Tudor England

Thinking of the laity in late Tudor England

The Politics of Vision in Shakespeare's "1 Henry VI"

Anyone today reading the phrase of in the title of an essay on a Shakespeare play generally prepares himor herself to adopt a version of a Foucauldian frame of reference for interpretation. For Michel Foucault, a shift in the focus and nature of the gaze between ruler and ruled forever changed the dynamics of political power in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe. Beginning with the Renaissance, the ever-watchful, usually invisible eyes of state surveillance of the subject, radically concentrated later in Bentham's Panopticon, gradually displaced the mutual gazes of the monarch on display and the courtiers and citizens he or she would control.1 In late Tudor England, the social field began to correspond to what Jacques Lacan has called the scopic field. The courtier, a man observing other men, and observed in turn, might indeed have remarked with the Lacanian subject: 'I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.'2 In the English 1580s and 1590s, this situation produced scopic anxiety, chiefly because William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham instituted an elaborate system of spying that made surveillance equivalent to a politics of vision.3 John Archer and Curtis Breight, among others, have shown that Elizabethan writers who were either involved in state surveillance or subject to scopic anxiety such as Christopher Marlowe and Sir Philip Sidney incorporated a politics of visual surveillance into works such as Edward II and the Arcadia.4 But a politics of vision in Shakespeare's time included more than the above-described

The true place of astrology among the mathematical arts of late Tudor England

Summary Sixteenth-century astrology was considered by its practitioners to be allied to a wide range of disciplines, including medicine, the magical arts and the mathematical arts. The last of these associations was particularly important, since it formed a cornerstone of the legitimation of the celestial art. Astrologers in late Tudor England sought to show, therefore, that astrology shared the characteristics of the increasingly strong and well-defined domain of the mathematical arts, and that it was an important ally of many of the individual arts, such as astronomy, navigation, and instrument-making. This association was demonstrated in practice, where astrology and other mathematical arts were mastered by the same practitioners.

Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives

Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical reforming spirit of the Edwardian years, Protestant views on political obedience remained fundamentally stable. The accession of Mary, however, created a critical dilemma for men who had been stressing the duty of obedience to one's ruler. Exile was only a partial solution, though among the exiles a handful of leaders worked out a theory of tyrannicide. Of those who took this course, John Knox in particular confused the issue by simultaneously raising the thorny problem of gynecocracy. Written while Mary Tudor was queen, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women appeared after Elizabeth's accession, when it was an embarrassment to Protestants. It was left, then, to the Elizabethans to rethink the entire question of political obedience.

Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives

Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical reforming spirit of the Edwardian years, Protestant views on political obedience remained fundamentally stable. The accession of Mary, however, created a critical dilemma for men who had been stressing the duty of obedience to one's ruler. Exile was only a partial solution, though among the exiles a handful of leaders worked out a theory of tyrannicide. Of those who took this course, John Knox in particular confused the issue by simultaneously raising the thorny problem of gynecocracy. Written while Mary Tudor was queen, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women appeared after Elizabeth's accession, when it was an embarrassment to Protestants. It was left, then, to the Elizabethans to rethink the entire question of political obedience. In the Elizabethan era there was a striking reversal of political theory with respect to the concept of active resistance. Protestant writers retreated from the radical new theory of tyrannicide and returned to the more quiescent position worked out in the early Tudor period. Neither the Calvinist doctrine of the right of lesser magistrates to overthrow tyranny and idolatry nor the assertion of this right by the common people (as espoused by Knox, John Ponet, and Christopher Goodman) was openly advocated by English Protestants, though it is possible that some of them found the Calvinist position acceptable. For their part, the English Catholics who accepted the validity of active resistance did not look for their inspiration to the Marian exiles but reflected a medieval tradition that included such theorists as Manegold of Lautenbach, John of Salisbury, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, and Jean Gerson.1