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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. -
L’Estrange His Life: Public and Persona in the Life and Career of Sir Roger L’Estrange, 1616-1704
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis dissertation examines the life and career of Roger L’Estrange, an unsuccessful soldier and prisoner for the king, royalist pamphleteer and Tory apologist, licenser of books and Surveyor of the Press, scourge of Protestant dissent and the first Whig party, literary translator and amateur musician. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
The Kirk, the Burgh, and Fun
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis complex web of interests and principles produces individual ironies, and the paper contrasts the activity of Haddington's one-time schoolmaster and play director, James Carmichael, who, as he reformist minister of the town, was chosen to subdue the author of a local May play (here named for the first time). -
Did the Glorious Revolution Contribute to the Transport Revolution?
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsMost studies on political change and economic development in Britain focus on government or private borrowing, taxation, and the stock market. Infrastructure investment has received little discussion by comparison. -
Victorian Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe Victorian era has long been associated with an idealized vision of Christmas. Where did this modern notion originate? -
Recusancy and Regicide: the Flawed Strategy of the Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsRecusants, or those who refused to attend protestant services, were acknowledged by the Catholic Church to be the highest, most noble sort of Catholics. -
“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. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
The Pacific King and the Militant Prince? Representation and Collaboration in the Letters Patent of James I, creating his son, Henry, Prince of Wales
Posted on October 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe Letters Patent is a complex object, containing a variety of visual and textual material which can only be properly understood when its contents, context and function are considered in their entirety. -
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. -
“Pillars of the Authority of Princes”: Reflections on the Employment of Bishops in the British Isles in the Reign of James VI/I
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsEven if he had never succeeded Elizabeth I and become king of England, James VI of Scotland was well aware of the regional challenges presented by the British Isles, and the limited force of government authority in some of its more remote areas. -
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. -
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. -
What if the Irish had Won the Battle of the Boyne?
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the answers to these questions would be pure speculation, it is possible to extmpolate certain patterns o f cause and effect, and piece together an alternate history. But first it is important to understand the situation in Ireland before, during, and immediately after the War ofthe Two Kings. -
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. -
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. -
Anne Askew and Margaret Fell: Religious Women in Prison And Technologies of the Self
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBoth Anne Askew (1521-1546) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) were imprisoned and wrote significant writings in jail. In prison Askew wrote The First Examination (1546) and The Latter Examination (1547); Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666). The two Protestants’ imprisonment indicates not only their struggle for freedom of their Protestant belief but also the government’s arbitrary exercise of institutional power over non-conforming women. -
Henry VIII: Supremacy, Religion, And The Anabaptists
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsAnabaptism was another variation of Protestant theology that began to emerge because of the Reformation. Their theology was considered the most heretical of the Reformation and they were persecuted all over Europe. Their noteriaty as extreme heretics caught the eye of Henry VIII. He realized they would make good tools to use in helping establish his new church. -
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. -
Discipline and local government in the Diocese of Durham, 1660-72
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsWhen John Cosin became Bishop of Durham in 1660, he faced a considerable task in re-asserting episcopal control and government, restoring the dignity and authority of the Church of England, establishing respect for i t , enforcing conformity and suppressing political and religious opposition. -
From Puritanism to Nonconformity, 1600 – 89: a study in the development of Protestant Dissent, with special reference to Yorkshire
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe definition of Protestant Dissent is a much easier matter, for Dissent was defined in 1660-2 by the refusal of some puritans to accept the new settlement of the Church and their decision to seek religious life elsewhere. -
English privateering during the Spanish and French wars, 1625-1630
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the fortunes of the King's fleet, waned those of the privateers waxed, as prize upon prize was seized and returned to England. The success of many privateers recalled the Elizabethan sea war against Spain, which many in the 1620s looked on as a golden age of English maritime plunder and as a model for the warlike efforts of their own generation. -
An examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsAn examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century. -
Witchcraft, Politics and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsBodenham’s fate was shared by several hundred others in early modern England, all of whom became trapped at a deadly intersection of circumstance. It is still sometimes assumed that ‘villagers were constantly engaged in contending with, or discussing, witches’, and that popular suspicions and grievances translated simply into prosecutions. -
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. -
Emasculated subjects and subjugated wives: discourses of domination in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682)
Posted on July 22, 2012 | No CommentsBetween 1681 and 1704, John Banks prepared for the stage four tragedies dealing with British history; three of them were centered on the meteoric rise and fall of doomed queens: Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Gray. -
The English Civil War in the American Colonies
Posted on July 15, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Privateers claiming to support the King operated out of Wexford and Waterford in Ireland as well as Dunkirk, it was not until the Royalists took Bristol, Exeter and Dartmouth in 1643 that they had major anchorages in mainland Britain from which to import arms, conduct trade and launch maritime operations. -
“Now is hell landed here upon the earth”: Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book
Posted on June 13, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1604, two editions of Thomas Middleton’s prose pamphlet The Black Book appeared. Ostensibly a sequel toThomas Nashe’s Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Black Book presents Lucifer’s response to Pierce Penniless’s “penetrable petition.” -
The Public Sermon: Paul’s Cross and the culture of persuasion in England, 1534-1570
Posted on June 13, 2012 | No CommentsOn the 11th of July 1533, Clement VII excommunicated Henry VIII in response to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s annulment of the King’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon and his ensuing coronation of Anne Boleyn. Clement’s action and the official response by the King and Privy Council constitute a striking moment of high-stakes political drama laden with significance for the future definition and formation of religious identities in early-modern England. -
Destructive Defiance: Catholic and Protestant Iconoclasm in England, 1550-1585
Posted on June 1, 2012 | No CommentsAny future studies on iconoclasm must pay more careful attention to the subject of iconoclasm, the visual image. We must understand how people perceived acceptable and unacceptable images, examining how people distinguished between the two. In England, certain images were allowed in one context and destroyed in another. -
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1533-1556: a political study
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsSuch evaluations of Cranmer, which slight his political abil- ity during the reign of Henry VIII, are inadequate. They leave unexplained the glaring inconsistency between the non-political pawn who was Henry VHI's archbishop and the determined protestant reformer of Edward VI's reign. -
The Seymour Family: Edward, Jane, and Thomas, c. 1500-1552
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Seymour family was a very old and well established, if not distinguished, family. Their lineage can be traced to an obscure knight who came to England v/ith 1/iliiam the Conqueror. The Seymour name came to the family in the first half of the fourteenth century when Sir Roger de St.Maur married Cicely,the eldest sister and heir of John de Beauchamp. -
“Unspottyd Lambs Of the Lord”: Presbyterianism and the People in Elizabethan London
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsAs a result of this popular appeal, the presbyterian movement was able to endure the systematic attempts to eliminate it carried out by the Queen and the church hierarchy, to continue to help shape the nation's religious climate under the Stuarts, and to leave a lasting mark on English culture. -
“The Prince and His People”: A Study of Edwardian Propaganda, 1547-1549
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe conclusion of this study draws direct parallels between the 1549 petitions and the rhetorical strategies used in the previous two years. The government’s direct patronage of this propaganda and the language that drew the commons into a political partnership with their king helped to spark the rebellions, resulting in a crisis of leadership and legitimacy. -
The English Reformation In Image and Print: Cultural Continuity, Disruptions, and Communications in Tudor Art
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe sixteenth century was a period of social, political, and religious change for the English Crown and people. Of these shifts the English Reformation and the resulting modifications to Catholic traditions were especially significant. Material culture (including art forms such as portraiture, church art, and illustrated texts) was a prominent indicator of larger political and religious alterations. -
The protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe English conduct book writers, themselves from the first generation of married pastors, saw it as their task to model the patriarchal family afresh for this new world. -
The German Reformation and Medieval Thought and Culture
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsAfter Luther’s death in 1546, it was said, the seeds mostly fell dormant in Germany, where leaders failed to rally around the philosophical core of Luther’s message, retreating into political division and older authoritarian patterns of thought. -
Seeking the Supernatural: The Exorcisms of John Darrell and the Formation of an Orthodox Identity in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis examines the questions raised by Darrell‘s exorcisms and the ways in which they were shaped by relations of power. I hope that it will shed new light on the ways in which people formed their religious and ideological identities in this pivotal period in English history. -
Scripture versus Church in the Debate of More and Tyndale
Posted on January 29, 2012 | No CommentsWritten law was given to the people of Israel as their morals got generally corrupted and they became blind to understand the will of God, thus God gave them the Ten Commandements of his his mercy... -
Beliefs and Approaches to Death and Dying in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis study evaluates beliefs and practices of death and dying among Puritans and Arminians in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, from the English Civil War era through the Glorious Revolution. -
The Family of Love and the Church of England
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsOn Oct 3, 1580,a Royal Proclimation was issued entitle, "Ordering Prosecution of the Family of Love". In it the Queen expresses her displeasure at "certain persons which do secretly in corners make privy assemblies of divers simple people unlearned people..." -
The English Diplomatic Corps, 1649-1660: a comparison Of the diplomats of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and of Charles II
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsOther historians have conducted prosopographical studies of British diplomats, but no one has studied the diplomats during the time of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. -
The politics of art and religion : Absolutism and Catholic iconography in early Stuart England 1603-1649
Posted on December 21, 2011 | No CommentsThe two Stuart kings, James and Charles, brought important change to England. For inspiration to modernize, James I looked outside of England, a strategy more vigorously pursued by his successor Charles I. -
Thomas Cromwell: aspects of his administrative work
Posted on December 12, 2011 | No CommentsThe conclusion attempts to account for the fact that in his administration Cromwell seems to have been guided by contradictory desires (to organise bureaucratically, and to evade bureaucratic organisation in the interests of personal ascendancy), and to assess his place as the founder of modern government in England. -
Signs and Wonders and the English Civil War
Posted on November 29, 2011 | No CommentsChris Durston records how the monstrous and the supernatural were seized on by political and religious factions in seventeenth century England as signs of judgment. -
Secretaries, statesmen and spies: the clerks of the Tudor Privy Council, c. 1540-c. 1603
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsThe office of clerk of the Privy Council has been largely ignored by historians.While some individual clerks who eventually rose to the ranks of the Privy Council have drawn some attention from scholars, most clerks are unknown, or mentioned only tangentially in journal articles or historical monographs. -
The Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture: Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700
Posted on October 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture:Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700 McKeever, Amanda Jane PhD Thesis, Philosophy, University of Sussex, September 27, (2010) Abstract My thesis seeks to address...