Seventeenth-century England Research Articles

The Noctambuli: tales of sleepwalkers and secrets of the body in seventeenth-century England

ABSTRACT Seventeenth-century readers were fascinated by marvellous tales of people known as the noctambuli who rose up in their sleep, performed daily chores and attempted dangerous feats, such as clambering onto rooftops. On account of their uncanny nature, commentators noted that sleepers could be mistaken for spectres or those who had been bewitched. Depictions of the noctamubli were also influenced by the Malleus Maleficarum, which had argued that they were acting under the influence of demons and would fall if their Christian name was called. Medical texts explained this behaviour in terms of the escape of hot vapours within the body, the powers of the imaginative faculty, and the impairment of common sense during sleep. While this explanation was widely accepted, in the 1650s it was challenged by alternative views from esoteric writings, which conceptualised the movements of sleepers in terms of mystical powers within the body.

Book Review: George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England

Book Review: George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England

Grinling Gibbons in context: the vitality of English seventeenth-century sculptural production

Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a small but significant number of studies dedicated to Grinling Gibbons. In the mid-century Gibbons’s establishment in the broader public consciousness can be traced in the emergence of children’s books and school plays that mythologized his life and career. Yet all publications, both scholarly and juvenile, are united in their presentation of Gibbons as the only sculptor of significance to have emerged in late seventeenth-century England. I argue that this is an inaccurate portrayal of the period, and one that was not shared by his contemporaries. By contextualizing Gibbons among his predecessors, collaborators and competitors, the specific nature of Gibbons’s sculptural contribution can be more accurately placed. Such an analysis further provides a perspective from which we can understand more fully the ways in which sculpture mattered to a seventeenth-century audience.

Parliamentary experience and contemporary democracy in Africa: A Northian view

ABSTRACT In a series of pioneering works, Douglass North argues that the institutional innovations taking place in seventeenth-century England as a consequence of a modification of the balance of power between the Parliament and the Crown provided the conditions not only for economic growth, but also for the development of democratic institutions later on. Our article extends his analysis to the study of parliaments in African countries before and after independence. We find that countries in which parliaments were established prior to independence are more likely to have efficient democratic institutions today. We define a variable of interest, ‘parliamentary experience at independence’, and estimate its effect on a democracy index. Several sensitivity and robustness tests confirm our results that parliamentary experience at the time of independence is a determinant of democracy in African countries today. This corroborates North’s idea that history and institutions do matter.

What Do Signatures Signify?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century English composers used only a handful of keys: they combined five keynotes (G, A, C, D, and F) with the three signatures documented in English solmization theory (♮,♭, and♭♭). By the end of the century English theorists described eighteen keys—all of the modern major and minor keys with up to four signature accidentals. But the route from eight to eighteen keys was not straightforward. This article traces this route by examining how the function of signature flats and sharps changed in seventeenth-century England. At the beginning of the century signature flats and sharps were clefs, mere notational symbols that provided a shorthand for the probable pitches in a composition. As a result, English musicians used adjacent keys (i.e., ♮-D and -D), which were distinct, well-formed versions of a broader category of D minor. In the middle of the century, composers and theorists used ad hoc and asymmetrical strategies ♭ to create new keys. Composers explored new flat keys through the process of signature creep, while theorists devised new sharp keys when they identified the parallel key relationship. Finally, theoretical interventions at the end of the century “fixed” keys into our modern system but obscured the varied pitch structure that still animated musical practice. The messy, flexible circumstances in which keys arose complicate several assumptions about modern key; this evidence challenges notions of transpositional equivalence and reveals that different kinds of keys may be built on different conceptual foundations.

L’Antiquité « à la mode » : traduction et travestissement littéraires, de la France à l’Angleterre (1650–1700)

Cet essai propose une étude parallèle des traductions anglaises des classiques antiques publiées dans la seconde moitié du dix-septième siècle anglais et de leurs « imitations » burlesques qui connaissent aussi (paradoxalement) à cette époque un véritable âge d’or. Alors que la critique littéraire a pu souligner la dynamique « hypertextuelle » (Genette) du travestissement littéraire, et ses liens avec le déclin des modèles littéraires et sociaux hérités de l’humanisme européen, on explore plus systématiquement ici les connexions intertextuelles et discursives, mais aussi matérielles et éditoriales qui associent intimement la « mode » littéraire du travesti avec les codes et pratiques néoclassiques de la traduction, en particulier le modèle français des « belles infidèles », lequel s’impose alors en Angleterre.

Thomas Hobbes’s Theological and Political Anthropology and the Essential Mutations of the Perception of the Laws of Nature and Natural Rights in Seventeenth-Century England

The overall goal of the article is to reexamine Hobbes’s concern to respond to the challenges of the republican perspective on the relationship between the liberty of subjects and the political power. If, according to Skinner, republican theorists appealed to sources of classical antiquity, I argue that Hobbes chooses to offer a blend of classical and theological ideas in order to generate a “science” of the political life within the confines of a postlapsarian world dominated by passion and the fear of death. If the image of God is maintained in the Hobbesian politics, it is because Hobbes needed a model of imitation of a stability that the individuals dominated by passions failed too often to have. Hobbes also needed a model of omnipotence and providence to be imitated by the sovereign. This complex relationship between the theological heritage of the past and the novelties inaugurated in political thought by Hobbes’s accent on human passions triggers a series of changes in Hobbes’s understanding of the law of nature and natural right. The article brings to discussion Hobbes’s indebtedness to Lactantius in reading Lucretius’s materialism, Augustine’s model of God as a Creator and the theological controversy between intellectualism and voluntarism when formulating his own anthropological perspective on “natural” and “civil” law and right.

Materiality and Satire in Marvell’s “The Last Instructions to a Painter”

In “The Last Instructions to a Painter,” Marvell articulates and then critiques the idealizing ethos of the Stuart regime by using a rhetoric of corporeality to reveal the limitations and falsity of this ideological vision, and to censure the corruption and misgovernance at the center of the body politic. Marvell employs the tradition of ut pictura poesis to frame his analysis of Stuart political culture and its notions of agency embodied by king and court. But Marvell reconceives the notion of ut pictura poesis, so that instead of being a vehicle for the expression of cultural ideals he invests it with a new, transgressive energy that is able to challenge patriarchal understandings of power. In addition, by intertwining the political and artistic spheres, Marvell is able to develop a theory of satire grounded in the materiality of human/nonhuman bodies that anticipates the modern philosophy of vitalism. The focus on human/nonhuman bodies helps to open up an imaginative space that extends agential possibilities to a dynamic material realm that complicates human-centered notions of agency and calls into question hierarchies of power. This vitalistic philosophy in turn helps to clarify and explain how the entangling of the materialities of the human and natural worlds in Marvell’s “Last Instructions” helps the poet to develop a sophisticated and expansive satiric voice while at the same time enabling him to critique the debased political realm of seventeenth-century England.

How Women Wrote about Themselves: A Corpus- informed Comparison of Women Writers’ Defences in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England

Women’s written defences of their sex developed within the literary context of the querelle des femmes, a mainly male debate on female intellectual worth, which started in the Middle Ages and came to a peak during the Renaissance. This paper focuses on the discourse some women writers started to develop in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England, when the growing number of misogynist attacks led some of them to respond in kind. The first works directly engaging the topics of the querelle are usually identified in Isabella Whitney’s poem The Copy of a Letter (1567) and Jane Anger’s Jane Anger Her Protection For Women (1589). These are coupled with three later pamphlets framed in the so-called Swetnam debate, from the name of the misogynist pamphleteer to whom these three women writers replied, namely A Muzell for Melastomus (1617) by Rachel Speght, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617) by Ester Sowernam and The Worming of a Mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus, a Redargution of the Bayter of Women (1617) by Constantia Munda. The qualitative reading of the texts reveals differences among them both in content and structure, which is supported by a corpus-informed quantitative comparison between the earlier and the later texts. The quantitative analysis also shows differences in the use of specific high and low frequency querelle-related lemmas, which signal a variation in the semantic fields related to the discourse on women. Such a mixed research method approach suggests that these variations could not be entirely ascribed to those literary works which had established the formal guidelines of the genre of the controversy, The Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus of Rotterdam and De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. To understand where these differences may come from, the English querelle texts are quantitatively compared with a small corpus of Italian defences of women, including Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600) by Moderata Fonte and La nobilità, et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’diffetti, et mancamenti, de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1600; 1621) by Lucrezia Marinella. This quantitative analysis shows that English and Italian women writers appear to share some structural and content-related characteristics which cannot be found in either Erasmus’ or Agrippa’s works or contemporary English writers dealing with the querelle. The hypothesis is thus advanced that there may have been literary contacts between England and Italy that indirectly influenced the development of the discourse on women within the context of the querelle des femmes.

Church Discipline in Seventeenth-Century England: Flourishing or Floundering? The Worcestershire Experience

ABSTRACT The Church was a powerful institution in early modern times with courts to enforce its laws on the people at large. Most historians, however, consider its disciplinary machinery to be in decline by the 1690s, while Evan Davies claims there was a new vitality in the enforcement of religious conformity in the Diocese of Worcester after the Restoration. What were the nature and extent of the Church’s controls over society? Charge sheets in surviving consistory court books show the nature of church concerns and how these changed over time, while analyses of numbers summoned, their attendance at court and completion of business reveal the extent of its controls over society. The article traces trajectories over the seventeenth century to bring a broader perspective than Evan Davies to these questions. It sets Worcester within trends in other dioceses to confirm that the Church was a diminishing force in society.

The impossibility of the triple helix

A dynamic model that distinguishes between slow and fast processes shows that a triple helix model is impossible as a tool for promoting interdependencies among science, industry and government. We present a theorem to demonstrate that a triple helix strategy is logically impossible as a means of funding scientific research in universities. In spite of this logical impossibility, national and regional triple helix strategies to improve productivity and innovative capacity have been favoured by politicians of almost every ideological stripe. Coordination of science and industry by governments is not new; it harks back to the mercantilism of seventeenth-century Britain and France. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, triple helix policies have led to a short-term bias in favour of applied technological research. Several examples, ranging from the military use of scientists in World War II to Chinese high technology parks show how triple helix strategies tilt playing fields, suppress academic freedom0 and expose scientists to the whims of politicians.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

“Exactly engrav’d by Tho

Thomas Cross Jr. was the first music printer to capitalize on the growth of public musical performances in late seventeenth-century England by producing cheap, single-sheet editions of the newest and most popular songs, especially those from the latest theater productions, for audience members and others in fashionable society to buy. As England’s first specialist music engraver, he was able to produce his simple prints of individual songs unusually quickly and to sell them at a fraction of the price of the larger movable-type anthologies that remained the mainstay of established London music stationers in this period. In the absence of intellectual property laws, Cross was free to print any music he could acquire, and he soon came to be seen as a threat by composers and music stationers alike. He clearly did not enjoy good relationships with contemporary composers, and we can safely assume that they did not supply him with his source materials. Given that his prints were nearly always the first published editions of the theater songs to appear in print, how did he obtain his musical texts? This article examines the hypothesis that Cross’s engravings may have derived directly from the stage performances of the singers he names in the titles of his editions, and that they may reflect the singers’ interpretations of the music “exactly engrav’d,” as Cross claimed. Comparison of the variants in Cross’s editions with readings preserved in sources that have known connections to contemporary performance demonstrates that his prints—despite their not undeserved reputation for inaccuracy—probably preserve contemporary performing practices more closely than has hitherto been acknowledged. Their significance as sources thus needs to be reevaluated, which raises broader questions about the criteria that scholars use when making judgments about the relative authority of sources from this period.

The Reformation of the Heart: The Making of ‘Mysticism’ in Seventeenth-Century England

ABSTRACT This essay considers the significance of various efforts – both Protestant and Catholic - to revitalise or revolutionise British religion in the seventeenth century, often seen as compromised by secular entanglement, using the resources of medieval and contemporary mysticism. The engagement with the Rhineland mystics and their Reformation disciples was central to this project, which helped to create the category of ‘mysticism’ in the English language, as a subversive but vital element in religious life. It is a central argument of this paper that modern ‘mysticism’ did not emerge simply as a polemical construct. Neither can it be attributed to a reaction against ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, mysticism – understood as a quest to recover a distinct spiritual way in religion, part of a continuous tradition through Christian history – had an agency and provenance of its own. This quest often and increasingly took the form of dissent from the established churches.

Fresh Fish: Observation up Close in Late Seventeenth-Century England.

The traditional view of London's Royal Society as a closed circle has been subject to revision in the past decades. Historians have shown the considerable extent to which the Fellows of the Society drew on a broad range of men of practice for their respective skill sets. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the contributions of fishermen and fishmongers to the creation of natural knowledge. It centres on the Historia piscium (Oxford, 1686), written by Francis Willughby and John Ray, and its surrounding sources. This natural history of fishes aspired to give a concise and precise overview of species, and to uncover the divine order in which they were created. While men of practice contributed to this project in multiple ways, their first-hand observations carried particular weight. Through their cumulative experience of working with fish they saw a great number of living species, rather than the dried exemplars that naturalists would usually consult in cabinets of curiosities, or the indirect evidence that images might present. This article examines what kind of exchanges took place between fishermen and fishmongers on the one hand and Fellows on the other, and where, how and why these were incorporated into the fish book. In so doing, it also aims to qualify the value attached to direct (natural historical) observation in the socio-cultural context of late seventeenth-century England.

FARMACI A PICCOLE DOSI: LA SCIENZA MEDICA NEI PRIMI DIZIONARI INGLESI

This essay examines the role of lexicography in the popularisation of medical terminology in seventeenth-century England. As a matter of fact, the compilation of the earliest monolingual English dictionaries proceeded side by side with the birth and early development of modern science. After sketching the lexicographical tradition of the so-called hard-word dictionaries and commenting on how these works were involved in the popularisation of science, and especially scientific terminology, in the seventeenth century, this essay focuses on all the medical entries in the very first monolingual English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s A table alphabeticall of 1604.

Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

Abstract This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain. By Nadine Akkerman

Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain. By Nadine Akkerman

QUANTITATIVE REASONING AND COMMERCIAL LOGIC IN REBUILDING PLANS AFTER THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, 1666

ABSTRACTRebuilding plans submitted after the Great Fire of London in 1666 have been widely treated by historians of the Great Fire and in wide-scope histories of London and modern city planning. However, few attempts have been made to assign an overarching logic to all of them, while paying attention to their texts as well as to their maps. The following article highlights certain common features in these abortive efforts to plan London, assigns a common logic to all of them, and traces the origins of this logic. Such an analysis illuminates the economic principles in plans that are usually examined for their architectural features, and places them in a different historical context. Rather than seeing them as manifestations of contemporary architectural trends, or as a continuation of ongoing attempts to regulate London's cityscape, the plans are presented here as a response to emerging ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England about the nature of value and the economic function of cities within the world of commerce. Such a view reveals the complex interplay between London's early modern growth and the emergence of new forms of knowledge in seventeenth-century England and reasserts the importance of these plans as forerunners of present-day city planning.

A Godly Law? Bulstrode Whitelocke, Puritanism and the Common Law in Seventeenth-Century England

Debates surrounding both the church and the law played an important role in the conflicts that marked seventeenth-century England. Calls for reform of the law in the Civil Wars and Interregnum complicated the apparent relationship between puritanism and the common law, as the first fragmented and the second came under attack in the 1640s and 1650s. This article first analyses the common lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke's historical and constitutional writings that defended the common law against demands for its reform and argued that its legitimacy derived from its origins in, and resemblances to, the law of Moses. Refraining from the radical application of this model employed by some contemporaries, Whitelocke instead turned to British history to make his case. This article then examines Whitelocke's views of the relationship between common law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his own day, showing how, both as a lawyer and as a puritan, he navigated laws demanding religious conformity. Whitelocke's career therefore demonstrates how lawyers could negotiate the fraught relationship between the church and the law in the aftermath of the reconfigurations provoked by the Civil Wars and Restoration.