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The Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsThe Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation Steven G. Ellis (The Queen's University, Belfast) The Historical Journal, 19, 4 (1976), pp. 807-830 Abstract In the 1530s, Henry VIII and Thomas... -
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. -
“The lying’st knave in Christendom”: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsWhat none of these studies have examined, however, is the performance of disability at the center of the St. Alban's episode. -
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay provides an analysis of the known surviving records relating to mimetic representation of non-biblical saints in a broad region of western England, from the north (Cumberland, Westmorland) to the southern tip of Cornwall. The question of how many of these references can be considered 'scripted' drama is addressed, and other categories (pageant, costumed guild ridings, and festive customs such as boy bishop ceremonies) proposed. -
The impact of the Reformation on the Tudor royal household to 1553
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe primary objective is to examine the impact of the Reformation upon private devotional practices of individuals within the royal household. -
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. -
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. -
The Reasons of Misrule Revisited: Evangelical Appropriations of Carnival in Tudor Revels
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsI want to suggest that this delightful anamorphic image, coupled with the Gallery’s dry commentary, provides an ironic but apt metaphor for the critical tradition addressing Edward’s reign and its theatrical spectacle: only when viewed from a one-sided point of view – in hindsight, from the anachronistic vantage point of an Anglo-American tradition inflected by subsequent protestantism – can the boy king, his often riotous court spectacle, and mid-Tudor evangelicals in general be made to resemble a ‘correct’ portrait of the protestant sobriety, indeed the dour puritanism, of later generations. -
Sincere Lies and Creative Truth: Recantation Strategies during the English Reformation
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis leaves a blank page in the history of religious persecution and tolerance in sixteenth- century England. This paper hopes to contribute to some recent studies which are attempting to fill it, such as those of Susan Wabuda and Brad Gregory. These historians both suggest that the crown did not press for recantation only to maintain power. -
“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. -
Managing Change in The English Reformation: The 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries and Clergy of the Midland County Surveys
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsDid the English Reformation happen because Thomas Cromwell, seeing political possibilities in the new religious ideas now abroad, applied these to resolving Henry VIII‟s marital difficulties? After all, Henry VIII wanted a son and, despairing of his now middle-aged wife, Katherine, had found a likely fruitful replacement in Anne Boleyn. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
“Partners in the same”: Monastic Devotional Culture in Late Medieval English Literature
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsTo understand this apparent incongruity, it is, I argue, necessary to interrogate more carefully the continuation of monastic literary culture and its gradual diffusion beyond the walls of the cloister. -
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. -
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? -
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. -
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. -
The early career of Thomas, Lord Howard, Earl of Surrey and third Duke of Norfolk, 1474-c.1525
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsMy aim has been to present a complete picture of the man, his family (so intimately involved in the life of every nobleman of this period) and their affairs in the years which are covered here. -
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. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
Wholesale or Retail? Antoine de Marcourt’s The Boke of Marchauntes and Tudor Political Theology
Posted on June 13, 2012 | No Commentsn England, 1534 marked an equally highly charged turning point in the association between humanism and religious reform, although with a somewhat different result both theologically and politically as compared to what was then occurring in France. -
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. -
Re-defining the English Reformation
Posted on March 4, 2012 | No CommentsThe collective problem faced by students of the Reformation, if indeed we have a problem, is not therefore one of nurturing a tender and precarious plant, struggling to thrive in stony and unyielding historical soil. Rather, it is the challenge of maintaining order and coherence in a large and untidy garden, alive with luxuriant foliage, periodic colorful blooms, and a smattering of undesirable weed. -
Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England
Posted on February 29, 2012 | No CommentsProtestants dismissed some of the more dubious aspects of medieval angelology, including the complex hierarchy of ranks formalized by pseudo-Dionysius in the first century. Anxious to combat tendencies that smacked of idolatry, they were also at pains to insist that people should neither venerate nor pray directly to angels. -
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. -
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 1536 Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries: Same Suppression, Different Century
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsFive hundred years ago, Henry VIII began the demise of monasticism in England. Beginning with the Suppression Act of 1536, and continuing with the Act for the Dissolution of the Greater Monasteries in 1539, monasteries across England were closed. -
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. -
Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?
Posted on November 29, 2011 | No CommentsConrad Russell finds that it is easier to understand why sheer frustration may have driven Charles to fight than to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution against him. -
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... -
Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime
Posted on October 24, 2011 | No CommentsKett’s Rebellion, the best known rising, occurred in Norwich, the second city of the nation, and on nearby Mousehold Heath, as thousands of campmen – peasants, tradesmen, and artisans fired by Reformation theology. -
Promoting ‘English Civility’ in Tudor Times
Posted on October 14, 2011 | No CommentsPromoting ‘English Civility’ in Tudor Times Ellis, Steven G. (National University of Ireland, Galway) Tolerance and Intolerance in Historical Perspective, (University of Pisa, 2003) Like states everywhere, the 16th-century English monarchy regulated... -
Growth, Consolidation and Revolution: Assessing the Various Views on the Rise of Protestantism in Scotland prior to 1560
Posted on September 13, 2010 | No CommentsGrowth, Consolidation and Revolution: Assessing the Various Views on the Rise of Protestantism in Scotland prior to 1560 Chung, Youngkwon Journal of the Oxford University History Society, Issue 3 (Michaelmas... -
The ”popular philosopher”: Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics
Posted on April 22, 2010 | No CommentsThe ''popular philosopher'': Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics Mitsi, Efterpi Early Modern Literary Studies 9.2 (September 2003) Abstract Sixteenth-century arguments on the role of poetry reveal the ambiguous... -
Other People’s History: Contemporary Islam and Figures of Early Modern European Dissent
Posted on February 23, 2010 | No CommentsOther People's History: Contemporary Islam and Figures of Early Modern European Dissent Abbas, Sadia Early Modern Culture, No. 6 (2007) Abstract Everyone seems to think Islam needs a Reformation. The...