Tudor State Research Articles

Novel Spaces

Novel Spaces

Lives of the Sisters of Syon Abbey ca 1415–1539: Patterns of Vocation from the Syon Martiloge and Other Records

Eileen Power’s work on medieval English nunneries laid the foundation for modern scholarship. This paper explores patterns of vocation in the lives of the sisters of Syon Abbey, a major national institution founded by Henry V in 1415. The paper is part of my Syon Abbey Prosopography Project, which traced c. 600 sisters, brothers and patrons c.1400-1600. Their geographical origins show how the royal dynasties of Lancaster, York and Tudor wove their regional affinities into a national elite, contributing to the emergence of the Tudor state. Nuns from loyal families served their royal masters through prayer. Early recruits came from Sweden, and from gentry and merchant families in England’s wealthiest regions: the Midlands, East Anglia, the South West and London. A few aristocratic nuns were effectively political prisoners who entered Syon following family treason. Later recruits came from courtier families settled in counties around London. ‘Syon families’ were loyal to church and crown for generations and were at the heart of opposition to the English Reformation. Although Syon was dissolved in 1539, the sisters defiantly continued to follow the Birgittine Rule in small groups, some in exile. Collectively their lives tell the story of Syon Abbey’s early centuries.

Guaranteeing what cannot be guaranteed. Defending and adapting bardic patronage in <em>Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic</em> (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn

This paper offers a historicized close reading of Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic ‘Here is the guarantee, Cormac’ (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (ca. 1550–ca. 1591), a 27-quatrain appeal to loyalist Sligo lord Cormac Ó hEadhra to be the master-poet's guarantor under the legal mechanism of booking (a form of legal registration or recording of dependents or followers of a given lord). The paper argues that the poem richly repays close literary-critical attention of the kind not usually accorded bardic poetry, displaying a remarkable rhetorical and political artistry in its deeply traditional, yet simultaneously richly innovative, defense of the patronly relationship, the native nobility that upheld it, and the bardic institution itself, as all were under threat from the transformations wrought by the expanding Tudor state.

‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland by Brendan Bradshaw (review)

Book Review ‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland, Brendan Bradshaw (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 318 pages. In the Irish parliament of 1536, legislation was passed which marked the introduction of the Reformation in Ireland, and the designation of the Church of Ireland as the Church ‘as by law established’. In 1969, almost fifty years ago, an article by Brendan Bradshaw on that parliament appeared. Thus began an academic output which has revolutionised our understanding of sixteenth century Ireland, largely by focusing on the political thought of those reformers from within the older colonial community, subsequently known as theAngloIrish . The high point of that local reform tradition, Bradshaw has shown in his book The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1979), was the act for the kingly title of 1541. The constitutional status of Ireland changed from that of medieval lordship, effectively embracing the Pale and, in a much weaker sense, the great dynasties of Ormond and Desmond, to that of kingdom, covering the entire island, and including all the inhabitants as subjects of the English king. Almost as a by-product of that research, Bradshaw produced a groundbreaking study of one of the Reformation’s consequences, entitled The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974). To these book-length studies may be added several seminal articles, including an exploration of the outbreak of the Kildare rebellion of 1534. This body of work, rooted in the approach of the Cambridge scholar G R Elton to the Tudor state, served to integrate the study of mid-sixteenth century Ireland into the mainstream of historical research and publication. As editor of five edited essay collections, Bradshaw contributed to the study of the emergence of the British state, leading to a reconfiguration of its early modern history by bringing the interplay between the constituent kingdoms into sharper focus. The year of Bradshaw’s first publication, 1969, marked the outbreak of the Northern troubles in Ireland. Among the groupings involved in the decades of violenceweretheIRA,drawingonahistoricsenseofnationalistgrievanceanda militarist republican genealogy. For professional historians, revulsion at the IRA campaign led to a questioning of the nationalist historical tradition. A process Studies • volume 106 • number 424 493 Book Review: Winter 2017/18 of deconstruction got underway. ‘Revisionism’ entered public discourse. In an article in 1989 (reproduced in this book), Bradshaw offered a wide-ranging critique of the ‘revisionist’trend in recent Irish historiography. Thus, in addition tohisspecialistworkontheTudorworld,asecondstrandemerged:thearticulation and defence of a nationalist view of Irish history. The present volume reflects both of these fields of interest. Of the fourteen essays (twelve already published, and two new pieces), nine are articles on particular historical topics, while the remaining five are reflections on the writing of Irish history. The locus classicus of Bradshaw’s case against the revisionists is in his article published in the professional journal Irish Historical Studies in 1989. While acknowledging the achievements arising from the professionalising of Irish history since the 1930s, Bradshaw challenged some dimensions which he detected in the direction this professionalisation had taken. Specifically, the tacit assumption of neutrality on the part of the historian: while enjoining objectivity, Bradshaw disputes that real neutrality is possible; the pursuit of neutrality (ultimately futile on his account) leads to an anodyne presentation which deepens the cleavage between the professional historian and the public who are interested in the story of their community. He noted a tendency to ignore or downplay catastrophe (for the early modern period he mentions land expropriation, large-scale violence against indigenous people, religious and ethnic discrimination), and a corresponding propensity to normalise disasters (for example, the Famine). In response to this deconstruction of the Irish nationalist tradition, Bradshaw seekstoassertitshistoricalcontinuity,anditsemergenceinthepoliticalthought of local reformers in the sixteenth century. These drew on classical notions of love of patria or homeland, current in the Renaissance, and built on a form of proto-nationalism among the colonial political group in the late middle ages. Bradshaw sees the integration into a single Irish nation of the descendants of the Anglo-Normans with the older Gaelic community as the fruit of shared dislocation at the hands of the new Elizabethan colonial elite...

William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State. By ChristopherMaginn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. xvi, 254 pp. £65.00. ISBN 9780199697151.

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 36, Issue 2 p. 251-253 Review William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State. By Christopher Maginn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. xvi, 254 pp. £65.00. ISBN 9780199697151. Rory Rapple, Rory Rapple University of Notre Dame, IndianaSearch for more papers by this author Rory Rapple, Rory Rapple University of Notre Dame, IndianaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12273Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume36, Issue2June 2017Pages 251-253 RelatedInformation

Asceticism, Dissent, and the Tudor State: Richard Whitford's Rule for Lay Householders

Richard Whitford's A Work for Householders constructs a model of household governance organized around the contemplative life of the lay householder and his pastoral command over his familia. A Work for Householder's companion text, A Daily Exercise of Death, centers on willed self-negation, teaching the householder monastic ascetic practices that emphasize rejection of the world and direct obedience to God. Together the manuals, which circulated widely during England's violent 1530s, work to interrupt the absorption of the Christian pastorate by secular state power. They do this by describing the household as a distinct locus of spiritual counsel, a self-enclosed unit that has only generalized interactions with other sites of religious authority. Lay piety in these texts does not aim to shelter its audience from the turmoil of surrounding events. Instead, the contemplative turn in Whitford's compilation explicitly absorbs the political, using it as fodder for potentially activist and resistant praxes.

Time and the Problem of Royal Succession in Shakespeare's History Plays

AbstractShakespeare's most innovative genre was the history play, because it has no precedent in either classical or medieval tradition. In contrast to the focused teleology of Christian medieval drama, Shakespeare's history plays manifest an implicit idea of history that was secular, political, and open-ended. They emphasize human action in a political arena, where the criterion for success is the ability to act in time, without regard to one's spiritual state. Time determines royal succession, which is the focus of all Shakespeare's history plays, as it was the focus of political concern in England in the 1590s, when the plays were written. His emphasis on time and royal succession distinguishes his implied political theory from the moralism and authoritarianism of official Tudor state doctrine on one hand and from the pragmatism of Machiavelli on the other.

The North-South Divide in Gorboduc : Fratricide Remembered and Forgotten

Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc metaphorizes the nation’s divide into North and South as a fratricidal feud. The narrative allegorically represents the southern English prejudice against the northern territory above the Humber. This provincial community had a shifting allegiance to the English Crown, and it was also against the unified juridical sovereignty and the Reformation propagated by the Tudor nation-state. This essay focuses on the effects of Gorboduc’ s reissue in 1570 by its official publication right after the Northern Rising (1569). If at the time of the play’s official print circulation, the settlement of the Rising was the burning political issue in the Elizabethan court, Gorboduc’ s reissue supports the Tudor state’s propagation by claiming that the nation’s disintegrated sovereignty into the North and South should be fully overcome by creating a southern-based centralized state.

The Deep Roots of Albion's Fatal Tree: The Tudor State and the Monopoly of Violence

AbstractBuilding upon some classical debates in historical materialism, this essay proceeds to a critical appreciation of the coercive capacities of the Tudor state. Balancing evidence for coercion against that for more subtle processes of negotiation and persuasion, it shows that when faced with substantial opposition, the Tudor state was capable of exercising massive organized violence. From this flow two key points: first, that the extreme violence of which the Tudor state was capable needs to be read alongside tentative evidence suggesting that in the mid‐ and late sixteenth century very high levels of capital punishment were quite normal; and second, that in its reaction to popular rebellion, the Tudor state fell back upon extra‐legal, informal but nonetheless tightly focused repression. In all these ways, then, there is a profound need for English historians to consider the Tudor state as not only the institutional focus of class power, but also to appreciate it as labouring at its worst: within the theatre of Ireland, the English state worked in the late sixteenth century as a repressive monster, gaining the potential to crush the interests, livelihoods and lives of people of Ireland into the bloody earth. Not for the last time, then, the repressive habits of the English ruling class found their most brutal expression in the things they did to Irish people. There are lessons here, Wood implies, for the present. Studies of the internal repressive capacities of the English state need – historically – always to be tied to its conduct within the island of Ireland.

English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young (review)

Reviewed by: English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young Michael C. Questier English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829. By Francis Young. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 308. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-5565-3.) The author has a very valid premise for this volume, which is that it is odd how little is written on Catholic attitudes to witchcraft and related phenomena in the period of the long post-Reformation. The question, then, is this: once one has reassembled all the evidence as to how far Catholics in England were implicated in contemporary beliefs about the supernatural, what does that tell us about them? There is no formal conclusion to this volume. But what we might take as its principal [End Page 321] finding is that there is embedded in the modern historiography of the topic an assumption that the style of Catholic religion in post-Reformation England was essentially a popular one. Also, it was likely that it would diverge from the rest of the national Church after the power of the Tudor State had been used to reform religion. In other words, these sensibilities would express themselves through popular forms, and those forms would resist the attempts of Protestant Reformers and of Catholic Counter-Reformers to change them. The claim has been that the new/Counter-Reformation clergy, imbued with the ideals of the Council of Trent, met with resistance to their way of understanding the Church and the world and were forced in the end to compromise with popular sensibilities and beliefs. This is compatible, of course, with the line in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971)—that is, that the Reformation purported to take away the means that the Church provided to deal with unwelcome and apparently supernatural phenomena and contributed temporarily to the rise of magical forms. The point that comes across here quite strongly is that there is a rather wide spectrum of Catholic opinions on these questions, as much skepticism and simple endorsement of, for example, how far demonic possession is actually possible. The author brings out well enough how the politics of debate about these issues generated skepticism as well as assent. The other line pursued here is that Catholic attitudes to these issues were not all that important in wider society and also Catholics’ opinions about these things were essentially the same as everyone else’s (pp. 121, 162). Historiographically this is of some significance and is demonstrably true as far as, for example, witchcraft beliefs are concerned. It is true also that Catholic attempts at spiritual healing were undertaken partly in competition with Protestant—or rather, Puritan—exorcists. On the other hand, from time to time, it was precisely these questions about supernatural power and how far the Church could exercise authority over the supernatural that led to overtly confessional disputes, something that came out into the open with the conduct of exorcisms, as the book’s sixth chapter shows very clearly. The signs are here, as John Bossy argued as long ago as 1975, that all this was somewhere near the center of post-Reformation Catholicism and certainly figures in the ministry of Catholic seminary clergy. This comes out in, for example, cases such as the “Boy of Bilson” in 1620. Here we have evidence of how a Catholic attempt to seize the moment created by (as it turned out) a fraudulent demoniac caused a series of ruptures in local society in which the presence of separatist Catholicism was very much an issue. In instances such as these—so seldom recorded but, one suspects, actually rather frequent—we have real evidence of how the continuities of Catholicism in and after the Protestant Reformation could have an impact despite the claims made by so many historians of the period that Counter-Reformation Catholicism retreated to the safety and relative invisibility of the interiors of gentry households. [End Page 322] Michael C. Questier Queen Mary, University of London Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State, by Christopher Maginn

The extraordinary flowering of sixteenth-century Irish history since about 1975 has transformed our understanding of events and generated illuminating controversy. It has largely, and rightly, been written from an Irish angle, whether that of the ‘New English’ soldiers and settlers or the government in Dublin, including the ‘Chief Governors’, the Crown’s representatives; or from that of the two established communities, the ‘Old English’, or the Gaelic ‘mere Irish’. (Nomenclature in this area is more than usually hazardous and value-laden.) Recently local studies have begun to illuminate the process further. The book under review, by Christopher Maginn, shifts attention back to Westminster and to the long-term. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the principal maker of Irish policy for almost the whole of Elizabeth I’s reign, aided between 1574 and 1590 by his ally Francis Walsingham. The Queen obviously took the ultimate decisions. But Cecil’s control of correspondence, his compilation of a vast database on Ireland, as on so many other topics, his careful weighing of pros and cons, gave him an authority which was difficult to challenge, even if decisions ran the further hazard of implementation (or not) by officials in Dublin.

William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor state

William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor state

Representing Rebellion: Memory and Social Conflict in Sixteenth-Century England

This paper takes key insights from social psychologists and interrogates them as methodological tools for historians, applying these theories to a large-scale uprising that occurred in southern England in 1549. In a social order based on notions of paternalism and deference, a diverse band of rebels were able to forge an alliance strong enough to pose a serious threat to local authorities in Norwich. Social psychological approaches to collective memory and evolving social representations are deployed to highlight contested memories of rebellion as central to Tudor state formation, and to understand how a rebel group with many competing interests was able to sustain their alliance. I argue that the imperative to understand individual behaviour in a collective context illuminates the way that this group could form a vision of the world which contradicted deferential social ideals without ranging themselves against central government. The article also suggests ways in which historical approaches can inform social psychological concepts.

The Case against Thomas More

When Thomas More resigned the office of chancellor in May of 1532, he departed from the government with the understanding that he would refrain from aiding or encouraging opponents of royal policy. This pledge was honored, but when events late in 1533 propelled Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, into prominence, More was not able to avoid the consequences of his association with her and became suspect of treason under provisions of new legislation being drafted by Thomas Cromwell. Our best guide to the government’s case against More are letters he wrote in his own defense late in 1533 and early in 1534. In addition, More’s circumstances at this critical time in the formation of the Tudor state throw into sharp relief the clash of Romano-canonical authority and the constitutional structure being created by the Reformation Parliament.

"Surrender and Regrant" in the Historiography of Sixteenth-Century Ireland

Early modern historians tend to concentrate on the violent interaction between the Tudor state and the inhabitants of Ireland. And with good reason: the extension of Tudor rule there saw brutality and warfare reach unprecedented levels, resulting in the destruction of the Gaelic political order. But the sixteenth century’s grim outcome has obscured the conciliatory policy pursued by Henry VIII’s government in Ireland. The most conspicuous feature of this policy was the submissions of dozens of Gaelic chiefs and English lords to the crown. Known to historians as “surrender and regrant,” this policy sought to integrate individual Irish lords, both politically and culturally, into the Tudor state. This essay traces interpretations of surrender and regrant, and the wider conciliatory policy of which it was a part, from the sixteenth century to the present, and suggests that this Tudor policy should occupy a more prominent position in the historiography of Ireland and England.

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Religious Exiles and the Tudor State

Much of the best recent scholarship on the implementation of the Tudor Reformations has chosen as its leitmotif the themes of obedience, conformity and acquiescence, collaboration even. The revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s overthrew convincingly the notion of widespread popular enthusiasm for religious change. But given that changewassuccessfully imposed, part of revisionism’s legacy has been a somewhat optimistic assessment of the capabilities of the Tudor state. Whether allied to the cause of religious reform, or that of religious reaction, Tudor governments were apparently remarkably effective at enforcing their will, largely because of their ability to co-opt the energies and loyalties of locally-based elites and sub-elites. In terms of this volume’s twin themes, it appears to be a case of discipline successfully exerted; diversity effectively curtailed.

Book Review: Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Book Review: Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (review)

Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (review)