Stuart Period Research Articles

Ancienneté among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell

The article offers a study of the theological method of Henry Dodwell, the most distinguished British savant of the late Stuart period and a leading figure in the Non-Juring movement. The study takes the form of arguments for the extension of the contemporary dispute between the Ancients and Moderns, in its historiographical dimension, into the field of divinity; for substantial modification of the claims made in discussions of the dispute about the inherent conflict between the Renaissance's desire for revivification of the past and its historical scholarship; and for reconsideration of the relationship between 17th century critical scholarship and the Enlightenment.

Beggary and theatre in early modern England

This title was first published in 2003. In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Starting with English vagrancy statutes and in particular from the fact that, from 1545 on, players were listed as vagrants, the book discusses from an entirely new perspective the reasons for the equation, in the early modern mind, of beggary with performing. Pugliatti identifies in players' aptitude for disguise and in the fear raised by their proteiform skills the issues which encouraged the assimilation of beggars and players; she argues that at the core of provisions against vagrancy was an attempt to marginalize people who, because of their instability in location and role (that is, in their theatrical quintessence), were seen as embodying potential for subversion. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. Finally, by carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.

Rivalry and Religion: the Borough of Shrewsbury in the Early Stuart Period

Rivalry and Religion: the Borough of Shrewsbury in the Early Stuart Period

:Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

In this highly innovative study, Ian Green examines the complete array of Protestant titles published in England from the 1530s to the 1720s. These range from the large specialist volumes at the top to cheap tracts at the bottom, from radical on one wing to conservative on the other, and from instructive and devotional manuals to edifying-cum-entertaining works such as religious verse and cautionary tales. Wherever possible the author adopts a statistical approach to permit a focus on those works which sold most copies over a number of years, and in an annotated Appendix provides a brief description of over seven hundred best selling or steady selling religious titles of the period. A close study of these texts and the forms in which they were offered to the public suggests a rapid diversification of both the types of work published and of the readerships at which they were targeted. It also demonstrates shrewd publishers' frequent attempts to plug gaps in a rapidly expanding market. Where previous studies of print have tended to focus on the polemical and the sensational, this one highlights the didactic, devotional, and consensual elements found in most steady selling works. It is also suggested that in these works there were at least three Protestantisms on offer an orthodox, clerical version, a moralistic, rational version favoured by the educated laity, and a popular version that was barely Protestant at all and that the impact of these probably varied both within and between different readerships. These conclusions shed much light not only on the means by which English Protestantism was disseminated, but also on the doctrinally and culturally diffused nature of English Protestantism by the end of the Stuart period. Both the text and the appendix should prove invaluable to anyone interested in the history of the Reformation or in printing as a medium of education and communication in early modern England.

The radical face of the ancient constitution: St. Edward's "laws" in early modern political thought

Acknowledgments 1. Hagiography and historiography: the long shadow of Edward the Confessor 2. 'Those most equitable laws of St. Edward': from the cult of the Confessor to the cult of the Confessor's laws 3. 'Divers and sundry ancient histories and chronicles': the articulation of the ancient constitution in the Tudor period 4. 'By lex terrae is meant the laws of St Edward the Confessor': the footprints of the Saxons in the early seventeenth century 5. 'You shall be king as while you rule well': the radical ancient constitution in the civil wars and the interregnum 6. 'The noble transcript of the original contract, the Confessor's laws': the radical Ancient Constitution in the late Stuart period Bibliography Index.

LICENSING, CENSORSHIP, AND RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.

:A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England

A Freeborn People is a provocative exploration of the ways in which the political cultures of the elite and of common people intersected during the seventeenth century. David Underdown shows that the two worlds were not as separate as historians have often thought them to be; English men and women of all social levels had similar expectations about good government and about the traditional liberties available to them under the `Ancient Constitution'. Throughout the century, both levels of politics were also powerfully influenced by prevailing assumptions about gender roles, and, especially in the years before the civil wars, by fears that the country was threatened by evil forces of satanic inversion. This dramatic reinterpretation of the Stuart period, based on the author's acclaimed 1992 Ford Lectures, begins a new chapter in the continuing debate over the historical meaning of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions.

Absolute monarchy and the Stuart Constitution

In this reinterpretation of the early Stuart period in England, Glenn Burgess contends that the common understanding of 17th-century English is oversimplified and inaccurate. The long-accepted standard view holds that gradual polarization between the Court and Parliament during the reigns of James I and Charles I reflected the split between absolutists - who upheld the divine right of monarchy to rule - and constitutionalists - who resisted tyranny by insisting the monarch was subject to law - and resulted inevitably in civil war. Yet, Burgess argues, the very terms that have been used to understand the period are misleading: there were almost no genuine absolutist thinkers in England before the Civil War, and the constitutionalism of common lawyers and parliamentarians was a very different notion from current understandings of that term. Burgess turns to the great body of common law that enshrined many of England's liberties and institutions. Examining the political opinions of such key figures as Sir Edward Coke and Sir Francis Bacon, he concludes that the laws of the land represented a civilization no monarchist would have attacked. Further, absolutism was a rare creed at the time and, while it was accepted that the king was next to God in authority, this detracted nothing from the insistence that he rule under the law. Rather than a polarization of ideas fuelling political division, says Burgess, it was Charles I's inappropriate exploitation of agreed prerogatives that exposed tensions, forged divisions and ruptured the pacified politics of which the early modern English were so proud. Burgess's perspective sets the political thought of Hobbes, Locke and others into contemporary context, revises the distorted view of pre-civil war England, and refocusses discussion on the real conflicts and human complexities of the period.

PRICES PAID FOR ITALIAN PICTURES IN THE STUART AGE

Early collectors of Italian paintings were able to buy pictures quite cheaply, direct from the Italian market. When growing competition from enthusiastic purchasers forced prices up, it remained possible to buy collections in bulk and strike excellent bargains. The shrewdness of Caroline connoisseurs was amply confirmed by the results of the Commonwealth sales. Collectors of the later Stuart period were no doubt less discriminating than their predecessors, but they still insisted on value for money. By the end of the seventeenth century the lineaments of the modern art market had already emerged in England. It was in their patronage of contemporary artists invited to England that Stuart art lovers paid excessive prices, probably because those Italian artists — nowgenerally considered second-rate — enjoyed rarity value.

The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture.

This is the first complete account, administrative, financial, political, social and cultural, of any court of the late Stuart period. It explains how and why an institution that had dominated each of these areas of national life under the Tudors and early Stuarts had, by the time of Queen Anne's death in 1714, largely abdicated that primacy and begun a long decline into respectable irrelevance. The author argues that Anne's court offered few of the opportunities - access to power, wealth, status and pleasure - that had made attendance at and allegiance to previous Tudor and Stuart courts so attractive.As a result, the power brokers chose to wield influence elsewhere,in industry and the professions. This study fills a gap not only in our understanding of the court, but in our understanding of loyalty and interest, government and politics, and society and culture during the Augustan age.

The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642

The events of the years 1600 1642 have been argued over intensively by historians. Central to these arguments has been a search for the causes of the English Revolution. Many recent historians have denied that the Revolution had any long-term causes, and they have begun to see the period before 1642 in its own terms. These historians have suggested that before the 1640s English politics was based on rather than conflict or opposition. Glenn Burgess examines the implications of these recent revisions of the early Stuart period for the history of political thought. This book is primarily a study of the political ideas of common lawyers the ideology of the Ancient Constitution and looks closely at the ideas of such men as Sir Edward Coke and John Selden. On this Dr. Burgess builds a general interpretation of early Stuart political thought. He argues that before 1625 was maintained in England, not because everyone agreed with everyone else, nor because there was no conflict over matters of principle, but because there were agreed conventions that held together seemingly contradictory political theories. Burgess examines the history of political thought in relation to professional groups civil and common lawyers, and clerics, primarily and in terms of the distinctive discourses they produced. After 1625 the boundaries between their discourses began to dissolve and political disputes became more threatening to the nation's stability. Through this approach, Burgess is able to show why it was that a period of ideological consensus was also a period of bitter political conflict.

Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting cases for conscience, 1667–1672

ABSTRACTOn what religious and political grounds did restoration nonconformists argue for ‘ease to tender consciences’, and what did they mean by conscience? These questions are central to any evaluation of nonconformist political thought in the early restoration. Such dissenting thinkers as Slingsby Bethel, John Humfrey, Philip Nye, John Owen, William Penn, and Sir Charles Wolseley authored arguments for conscience during the intense debate about the restoration church settlement that occurred between 1667 and 1672. This essay outlines four different cases for conscience to which these arguments contributed. Two of these cases reconciled claims for conscience with the ecclesiastical authority of the monarch. Two other cases for conscience challenged the traditional religious authority of the crown.Should any or all of these arguments for conscience be considered radical arguments? The answer to this question requires a definition of the term ‘radical’ – one that is appropriate for the late Stuart period. The grounds upon which early restoration advocates of conscience accepted an indulgence under the royal prerogative in 1672 are also explained.The essay addresses the historiography of the restoration by considering Christopher Hill's and Richard Ashcraft's views about dissenting thought. It also proposes that the 1667–72 debate about the state and religion raised so many critical issues as to constitute an early restoration crisis about conscience.

C.D. van Strien, British travellers in Holland during the Stuart period. Edward Browne and John Locke as tourists in the United Provinces

C.D. van Strien, British travellers in Holland during the Stuart period. Edward Browne and John Locke as tourists in the United Provinces

Gli araldi della commedia: Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento by Paola Ventrone

260Comparative Drama Paola Ventrone. GIi araldi délia commedia: Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Ospedaletto (Pisa): Pacini Editore, 1993. Pp. 219. Paola Ventrone's volume on theater in Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries constitutes one of the most significant and original recent contributions to the field. Based as it is not only on the author's many years of research in the archives, but also on her own firm view of theater as more than mere literature or simple script, it paints an extensive, complex, and at the same time wonderfully detailed picture of theatrical activity in the city. The author sees theater as a function of civic life and as a reflection of profound social or anthropological currents. As a result, theater and city become closely linked in her analysis, one serving the other's interests and contributing to each other's self-definition. In order to examine such conjunctions and symbiotic relationships, the author not only has examined a variety of archival and manuscript sources but also has re-examined well known documents so as to re-construct the context and the dynamics that gave life to theater in Florence. For example, the first chapter opens with an examination of "The myth of the princely patron" as it applies to Lorenzo de' Medici, only to conclude that the sporadic nature of his patronage of spectacle argues more against than in favor of the traditional view of his contribution to Florentine festivities. The "tradition" of Medicean jousts is then immediately exposed as an example of one such myth. Ventrone's volume is not, however, just revisionist history. It is also an excellent exploration of what constitutes theater in an early modern society. A few traditional concepts of "theater" as expressed and formulated by historians of literature fall by the wayside in such a process. As the author herself points out, the concept of "genres" gives way to a polymorphous "corn-presence" (compresenza) that functions dialectically between continuity and transformation to foster the development of "spectacle" (p. 9). In her view, not only jousts but also religious processions and even the narration of novelle in private gatherings or the recitation of cantan on the Piazza di San Martino become part of the tradition. In Ventrone's book the contributions made to the development of theater and spectacle by individuals such as the poet and philologist Angelo Poliziano or the ousted Florentine secretary Niccolö Machiavelli share the covers with those of lay religious confraternities or of carefree "compagnie di piacere." And, to add a new twist to an old story, an unexpected character has been allowed to slip in: the Herald of the Florentine Republic, whose duties were not only to represent the Republic in public embassies or events but also to entertain with songs and recitation the magistrates at banquet in the Palazzo della Signoria. With his entry into the cast of characters the title of the volume turns into a pun and the history of theater in Florence gains a new player. There are very few criticisms indeed to be levelled at the volume. Reviews261 Given the wealth of manuscript and printed sources cited or mentioned in the notes, a bibliography at the end of the volume would have been very informative and welcomed. Similarly, all long Latin quotes should have been translated into Italian (the days of general scholarly fluency in Latin are—alas—long gone, even in Italy). In spite of such observations , any other criticisms or regrets that could be levelled at this volume are truly overshadowed by the enormous contribution it makes to the history of theater and spectacle in Renaissance Florence. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto Molly Smith. The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His Successors. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. Pp. 193. $32.50. Cynthia Marshall. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology . Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 142. $24.50. The representation of humanity's seemingly endless capacity for nastiness, commonly known as evil in former times, is undoubtedly a dominant phenomenon in drama of the early Stuart period. Molly Smith's study centers quite strongly on the...

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653.

Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he demonstrates that new possibilities in the import trades--more so than problems in the traditional cloth trade--were behind the foundation of the long-distance commerce to the east. He shows, in turn, the way in which social groups of great City merchants wielded organizational and political power to exploit the emerging commercial opportunities. Brenner demonstrates the enormous significance of merchant politics for national political development from 1621 to 1653. He brings out, in particular, the decisive roles played from 1640 by London's great company merchants in support of the crown and by a new social group of entrepreneurs--the politically radical and militantly Puritan traders who developed the colonial plantation commerce--in support of the parliamentary leadership. The new colonial merchants assumed great national influence with Cromwell's victory, becoming the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.

Great Scott! The Restoration in Turmoil, or, Restoration Crises and the Emergence of Party

The contributions of James Rosenheim, Gary De Krey, and Tim Harris suggest the possibility of fashioning a fresh model of the Restoration by refining Lawrence Stone's seismographic typology, which posits three aftershocks of the mid-century revolution, namely the crises of 1678-83, 1688-89, and 171215. Jonathan Scott has recently revised this schema by underscoring the extent to which the roots of the crises of 1638-42, 1677-83, and 1687-89 were popery and arbitrary government. De Krey now asks us to recognize a prior in the period 1667-73, one which was intensely ideological and featured a struggle between those who sought to defend the security of the state and established church on the one hand and those who saw themselves as defenders of individual rights, Protestantism, and the English constitution on the other. In terms less suggestive of a whiggish perspective, the issues were not just arbitrary government and popery but also legitimate authority and order. So conceived, an appropriate model for the late Stuart period is not a time of stability, a tone poem to which is appended a turbulent double coda-the exclusion crisis and the tumultuous reign of James 11-but an epoch in which instability was the norm owing largely to the intemal tensions of the Restoration settlement, the legacy of the revolutionary decades, and the growing specter of a militant, Catholic France. De Krey's argument is generally persuasive, but the late Stuart period actually commenced with an earlier, no less critical crisis-that which extended from Cromwell's death in September 1658 to the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664 and its aftermath, a period bifurcated by the restoration of the monarchy. The clear intent of the restoration was to settle the questions of legitimacy, authority, and religion-a task that took until 1664. Between 1660 and 1664 the authorities had to suppress a military revolt by John Lambert; Thomas Venner's Fifth Monarchist uprising, which lasted nearly seventy-two hours and left some forty dead; the republican Tong plot; the much more serious conspiracy of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and eight members of the Irish Parliament to secure the interests of English landowners in Ireland and a state church loyal to the principles of the Solemn League and Covenant; and the 1663 northem rebellion, whose manifesto cited the need to protect lives, liberties, and estates and to extirpate popery. This period also witnessed a struggle at Westminster over comprehension, toleration, indemnity, and control of the corporations. The radical threat undoubtedly contributed to the failure of the Savoy Conference and the passage of the Corporation, Uniformity, Quaker, and

The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban Growth in the Early Stuart West End

The early Stuart period witnessed a startling transformation in the physical environment of the royal court. At James I's accession, Whitehall and the great courtier's palaces along the Strand still lay in an essentially rural landscape. To the south, Westminster was a compact town of perhaps 6,500 people, while to the north and east, the three Strand parishes of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, St. Mary le Savoy, and St. Clement Danes contained another 6,000, mostly concentrated in a narrow ribbon along the Strand itself. North of the Strand, the landscape remained open except for a thinner ribbon along High Holborn. Covent Garden was a pasture and orchard, containing a number of fine timber trees, St. Martin's church was still literally “in the fields“ and Lincoln's Inn Fields comprised over forty acres of open land. Dairying and market gardening were going concerns over much of what soon became the West End. Only a few years before, St. Martin's parish had experienced an enclosure riot.On the eve of the Civil War, a continuous urban landscape extended from Temple Bar as far as Soho, and ribbons of development spread along both sides of St. James's Park, as far as Knightsbridge and Picadilly. The population of old Westminster had increased by about 250 percent, while the Strand area grew even more rapidly, with St. Martin's-in-the-Fields experiencing more than a fivefold increase to as many as 17,000 people. Had they been independent settlements, all three of the large West End parishes of St. Margaret's Westminster, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Clement Danes would have ranked among the half dozen largest English provincial cities. In all, the western suburbs' population probably stood between 40,000 and 60,000.

On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s

There has not been a time since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which so many radically irreconcilable views of the seventeenth century have been competing for acceptance. Certainly, the impact of marxism and of the social determinism inherent in the great controversy about whether the gentry were rising or falling (or neither), and what difference it made anyway, was disruptive; but these disruptions occurred within the framework of a generally-accepted whig paradigm. Was marxism ever anything more than whig history with statistics? The answer is perhaps no, though it was frequently less, lacking statistics where they surely ought to have been. Seventeenth-century historiography would seem to exemplify well Lawrence Stone's thesis that dissatisfaction with social and economic determinism has resulted in a return to narrative history.' Looking back we might see marxism and other social determinisms as attempts to modernize the whig paradigm,2 and our predicament as the result of the failure of these attempts at modernization. To grasp the pattern underlying recent revisionist work on the early Stuart period we need to look briefly at this failure. This will give us some idea of what 'revisionism' is intended to do (and what it does in fact do). The chief characteristic of the work done in the I950s, I960s and early I970S (whether from the marxist perspective of Hill or the sociological perspectives of Stone and Zagorin) was an attempt to graft onto a basically whig political history some sort of social dimension. The problem with this was not that no satisfactory or meaningful links could be made between society and politics. Rather, the links that could be made were coming to be seen as over-reliant on reductionist assumptions. Once the essential emptiness of reductionism was recognized, the return to narrative (in Stone's very loose sense) became inevitable. This point is a simple one: if it is accepted that politics can never be 'reduced' to something else or explained totally in terms of some other thing, then it becomes necessary to treat it, at least in part, on its own terms as an activity with

Charles the Second, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland

Based on much previously unused material, this is a full-length biography of one of the most popular of all English sovereigns. Covering his life from a childhood marred by the advent of civil war, through his colourful years as a prince on campaign and as a monarch in exile in France and the United Provinces, to his Restoration and 25-year reign, this biography also considers Charles's rule in Ireland and Scotland, making it a united history of the British Isles in this period. The work should interest students and scholars of the Stuart period, general readers interested in biography, monarchy, and 17th-century history.

The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England.

Horses played a vital role in the economy of pre-industrial England. They acted as draught animals, pulled ploughs, waggons and coaches, worked machines, and transported goods around the country. As saddle animals they enabled their riders to carry out a wide variety of tasks, and at all levels of society they were regarded as status symbols in a unique relationship with man shared by no other animal. During the Tudor and Stuart period, horses were needed in ever-growing numbers, and for a greater variety of tasks. As demand grew, improvements became necessary in the means of supply and distribution. The agents of change, the specialist dealers, were often condemned as rogues and cheats, whose actions raised prices and caused shortages. Dr Edwards argues that, far from being generally unscrupulous, the dealers were no better or worse than those amongst whom they lived and worked.