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Henry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law Steven G. Ellis (University College, Galway) The Historical Journal, 24, 3 (1981), pp. 513-531 Abstract It has been traditional to regard the reaction... -
Representations of Elizabeth I
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis looks at three themes in representations of the Queen in Elizabethan literature. They are: the problem of representing a female ruler; the relation between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin Mary; and representations of Elizabeth as Cynthia, the moon-goddess. These topics are seen as focal points for problematic issues in panegyric. -
John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsSince neither of the most significant early Arthurian pseudo-histories go so far as to place Arthur in Greenland, America, or the Arctic—although Geoffrey's account prefigures such claims by extending Arthur's conquests to the farthest known northern and western limits of European civilization—we must therefore turn to Dee's own manuscripts for some illumination as to where this idea came from and how it developed. -
Devising the Revels
Posted on March 19, 2013 | No CommentsRevels were the result of collaboration by painters, sculptors, costume designers, poets, composers, artisans, and labourers in relation to whom an appointed supervisor (beginning in 1510 called the master of the revels) stood as what we might call executive producer and director. -
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween 1590 and 1634, a period more or less exactly coterminous with the great age of English Renaissance drama, a group of remarkable houses took shape in the north Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. -
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe linking of thunder and lightening with supernatural figures was not theatrical in origin; rather, the effects were a theatrical reproduction of unnatural disruptions generally believed to accompany the appearance and actions of figures such as witches, devils, and conjurers in the real world of the audience. -
Romeo and the Apothecary
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsSince the apothecary in the source is no more than a plot device, we might wonder why Shakespeare devotes so much space to him if he is only such a device in the play as well. -
Vengeance, Variously: Revenge Before Kyd in Early Elizabethan Drama
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsAccordingly, this essay will respond to Broude’s call for ‘a systematic study of revenge tragedy’s dramatic antecedents in England’. -
Miraculous Rhetoric: The Relationship between Rhetoric and Miracles in the York ‘Entry into Jerusalem’
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsI argue that the York playwright juxtaposes overt references to verbal persuasion with depictions of miracles to highlight the differences between the uncertainty of his audience’s world and the miraculous certainty of the biblical narrative performed before them. -
Burghley: Minister to Elizabeth I 1520-1598
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsJoel Hurstfield's pen portrait of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520-98) appeared in History Today in December 1956. -
Guns, Gales & God: Elizabeth I’s ‘Merchant Navy’
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsIan Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think. -
Conflicts and Loyalties: the Parliaments of Elizabeth I
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsParliament, in the modern sense as a permanent body, has existed only since the late seventeenth century. In Elizabethan England there were parliaments (plural). They were infrequent. In 1509-1603 there were 43 years during which parliaments were not called at all, and 26 of these occurred during Elizabeth’s reign. When parliaments did meet, moreover, they were short-lived. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Images of the courtier in Elizabethan England
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsWho, exactly, counted as a courtier? Was the holding of court office a prerequisite, or was sporadic attendance on the monarch sufficient qualification? What hierarchies, official and unofficial, operated within the royal entourage? How readily was service - often menial in nature - reconciled with self-aggrandizement and the brokerage of power? What was a courtier’s primary duty, and what could he or she hope to achieve? -
In a Short Time There Were None Almost Left: The Success and Failure of the Tudor Conquest in Ireland
Posted on December 29, 2012 | No CommentsWhile England succeeded in pacifying the Irish with ‘fire and sword’ during the Desmond Rebellion (1579-1584) and again in the Nine Years’ War, its success came at an enormous cost, both in terms of lives and coin. Furthermore, the goal of ‘reforming’ Ireland religiously, socially, and agriculturally--so frequently expressed in contemporary English writing--was not achieved in any meaningful or lasting way during this period. -
Social status and literacy in north-east England, 1560-1630
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsExamination of the surviving depositions from our ecclesiastical jurisdictions reveal something of the pattern of illiteracy in England from the age of Elizabeth to the end of the Stuart era. -
Shakespeare’s Richard II: Machiavelli for the Good of England
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe name Machiavelli has negative connotations, and this way of thinking is not new. Throughout Europe, in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, Machiavellianism was associated with unscrupulous abuse of power, and Machiavellian methods were seen as immoral and evil. -
Negative Portrayals of Poles in Elizabethan Literature
Posted on December 8, 2012 | No CommentsAnglo-Polish relations improved during the first half of the sixteenth century. The newly established power of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania probably raised English hopes that English merchants would gain greater access into the Baltic Sea. High-level diplomatic contacts between the two nations became more frequent. -
“The Wonderfull Spectacle” the Civic Progress of Elizabeth I and the Troublesome Coronation
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsElizabeth I faced far more challenging ecclesiastical and liturgical difficulties than either of her predecessors, and yet, characteristically, her solution was more adroit and more oblique. -
Othello’s Alienation
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough I agree broadly with the arguments of Jones and Hunter, it seems to me important to appreciate the particularityof Shakespeare'sportrait and its resistance both to negative stereo- typing and abstractuniversalizing. There is little question that in choosing Othello for his protagonist Shakespearesought to create a realistic portrait of a Moor. -
A Special Reference to the Correspondence between England and the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt 1585-1587 ; Diplomatic Communication in the Early Modern Europe
Posted on November 21, 2012 | No CommentsA significant part of this Leicesterian correspondence has been preserved to our days, and it offers an excellent case study of the diplomatic communication in the Early Modern times. The original letters are located in the various archives of the Netherlands, Great Britain and France. In addition, many of them are printed in collections. By examining this correspondence, it is perhaps possible to trace the broader conventions of communication in the Early Modern Europe. -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
Women in The Book Of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No CommentsFoxe had made the decison to publish his work on the martyrs and the history of the Christian church in English, thus providing him with a much larger audience. As a good humanist, he had first considered Latin (his earliest work on the martyrs, written during his exile, was in Latin) but he felt the English people had the best claim on this information, and it could only reach them in the vernacular. -
Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 1621-24
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Scottish (and English) historians have not ignored the famine of 1621-24, the crisis still needs to be adequately contextualised within investigations into the development of poor relief in the early seventeenth century. -
James VI ‘s Ius Suum Conservare: His Intrigues with Spain, 1580-1603
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1580, Scotland was drowning in a sea of instability. James was in a position which, for good or ill, was fraught with momen- tous issues for the future of the kingdom. Yet the task of controlling the forces in Scottish political life might well have been too much even for a skilful and determined statesman. James, aged only fourteen, faced two complex tasks: to govern an intractable realm, and to successfully endure, and if possible take advantage of, the increasingly tense relations between England and Spain. -
The Rise and Decline of the British “Patriot”: Civic Britain, c. 1545-1605
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsHume’s dialogue provides one of the earliest instances of the Anglophone neologism “patriot” used to describe a participant in either Scottish or English politics. The term itself, however, was far from new: it had appeared in print in Huguenot tracts at least from 1574, following the St. Bartholomew catastrophe. -
The True Executor of the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper examines the culpability of Elizabeth and her Councillors in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the woman who threatened to take Elizabeth's throne and life away from her. -
A Scottish Threat: Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsOne must ask, after nineteen years of confinement, was Mary, Queen of Scots really such a threat to Queen Elizabeth that her death would be necessary? -
Heinrich Bullinger and the Marian Exiles: The Political Foundations of Puritanism
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper two fundamental issues related to the Reformed views on politics from the sixteenth century will be considered: Firstly, what the theoretical origin of these Reformed views were, and secondly, identifying the political basis for the views of the Huguenot theorists. -
The Impact and Importance of the Elizabethan Re-Conquest of Ireland
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe English rule of Ireland had, in the fifteenth century, only been to a certain extent consolidated in the area known as the Pale.1 Under the reign of King Henry VIII, the Irish were brought a bit more under English control... -
The public life of Francis Bacon
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsFrancis Bacon was born on January 22, 1561, the youngest son of Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, England’s highest judicial officer, said to have been the second “prop” of the Kingdom. -
Anglo-American Relations Before 1580
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsIt took the American Indian to show English (or more particularly Welsh) historians that it really couldn't have been quite like that... -
Religious Disputation in Tudor England
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsIt may be said that the Reformation itself began with a disputation: the Ninety-Five Theses of Wittenberg, on which Martin Luther offered debate with all comers, and Luther was tulned into a schismatic by another disputation, in which he gave his enemies definite grounds for urging his excommunication. -
After marriage: The literature and culture of divorce in England, 1515-1650
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe following pages will argue that in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the idea of divorce, of marriage's breakdown and dissolution, was as important a concept as that of the marital union itself. -
An Englishman Who Collaborated with the Spanish Armada
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsAccording to Catholic historians, this one man is the prototype of all the guileful Jesuits who creep furtively in and out of the plots of numerous English novels. -
Francis Bacon’s use of ancient myths in Novum Organum
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper, I will show how the ancient myths of Pan, Perseus, Dionysius, and Prometheus have an impact on Book I of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. -
The Grotesque Body: Early Modern Representations of Women and the Subversion of the Elizabethan World Picture
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe language of some tragic heroines from the English Renaissance is the first subversive strategy that contributes to uncover the oppressive doings of the hegemonic group. -
Reading Silk: England’s Search for a National Identity, 1590-1630
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn this thesis, I plan to demonstrate that silk becomes a tool for nation building. While at first the English peoples’ insatiable appetite for silk creates an identity crisis of sorts for England, with the conflicting desires to emulate foreign practices and also to remain steadfast to the nation, silk is eventually recognized as a material that has the power to unite the English people. -
A Body Politic to Govern: The Political Humanism of Elizabeth I
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn this dissertation I demonstrate a discernible influence between the thoughts and virtues of political humanism upon the public presentation of Elizabeth I‘s political persona. -
Devotion and Piety of English Women, 1480-1620
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThese very personal invocations to God were self-reflective and pensive, capturing some early modem English women's desire and need to comprehend the intrinsic complexities of their intimate relationship with God. -
English Reformation and Irish Witches: The Effects of Confessionalisation in Suppressing Witchraft Accusations in Early Modern Ireland
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIndeed, Ireland stands out among the countries of early Modern Europe as having very few recorded witchcraft trials and no actual witch hunts. In point offact, there was no actual statute in Ireland criminalizing witchcraft until 1586.3 Why was Ireland spared this plague of internal suspicion that took the lives of nearly 50,000 women and men in the rest of Europe? -
‘So manie gallant gentlemen’: Imperial humanists and Tudor imperial identity
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsIn Tudor England, the salient features of civic humanism became support of the status quo according to a "princely" model, an emphasis on the vita activa as necessary for a life of manly virtue, and a commitment to programs of social and economic reform instituted by the state. -
John Prestall: A Complex Relationship with the Elizabethan Regime.
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis is the biography of John Prestall, a gentleman from Elizabethan England. However as Norden‘s barbed prose suggest, a gentleman in social rank only. He spent his life egotistically peddling his magical abilities to members of Elizabeth I‘s Court, and conspiring to replace Elizabeth with those disaffected by her Protestant rule. John Prestall‘s life weaves through the perverse and often baffling political underworld that existed on the penumbra of the salubrious Elizabethan Court. -
Sir Francis Vere in the Netherlands, 1589-1603: a re-evaluation of his career as Sergeant Major General of Elizabeth I’s troops
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsA combination of a lower profile commander and an apparently less interesting and significant Anglo-Dutch alliance has in turn led most historians to neglect these areas in preference for the earlier period and protagonists of their connection. -
Ideal and practice : aspects of noble life in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsEarly modem England witnesseda significant number of political, social and cul- tural changes.The transformation of the ideal of the nobility was amongthosechanges.The sixteenth century saw the appearance of humanist tracts that tried to redefine the idea of nobility, and its role in society. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
John Knox: Gynaecocracy, ‘The Monstrous Empire of Women’
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsThese were teachings of resistance to religious oppression that, in Britain, first ripened in the reigns of the contemporary British queens, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, of England, and Mary of Guise2 and Mary Stewart, of Scotland. As mon- archs these women were in a position that enabled them to have a religious role that went beyond the conventional one, that of patrons and protectors: they could impose their religion. -
‘Books with manuscript’: the case of Thomas Cranmer’s library English plague regulations and Italian models: printed and manuscript items in the Yelverton Collection
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough European cities outside Italy, for instance Lille and Barcelona, took measures to control plague during the fifteenth century, in England attempts at regulation were sporadic and local until January 1518, when a royal proclamation was issued, ordering, for example, that infected houses should be marked. -
Discourse on History, Geography, and Law: John Dee and the Limits of the British Empire, 1576-80
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsRecently, literary scholar William Sherman offered the most detailed examination of Dee's imperial writings yet attempted, including a brief discussion of his most important collection of manuscripts on empire, the "Brytanici Imperii Limites," which was only discovered in 1976.