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THE DESTRUCTION OF A PRIORY
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsMerton priory was now suppressed, and demolition began immediately. There would have been countless workmen and craftsmen employed at the priory, but would they have been willing to destroy the work of their own hands? All strata of society had difficult decisions to make. Principles could so easily be forgotten, especially where there was a family to feed and no prospect of other employment. -
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... -
Milton’s History of Britain in its historical context
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe prologue studies the Tory publication of Milton's Character of the Long Parliament (1681). It argues that the provenance of this tract is best explained if Milton did in fact attempt to include the Digression in his History of Britain. Further ambiguities in Milton's early reputation are discussed in a review of the History's reception. -
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 role of the laity in the Church of England, c. 1850-1885
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe initial hypothesis which I state and then set out to test and refine here is the hypothesis that lay membership of the Church of England during the Mid and late nineteenth century largely ceased to be an involuntary act and became, instead, a voluntary one. -
“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. -
On Resistance: The Case of 17th Century Quakers
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsDrawing on Scott's influential paradigm I present an historical anthropology of seventeenth century Quakerism, focusing on this religious movement from its genesis in around 1650, to the Act of Toleration in 1689. -
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. -
The house is hers, the soul is but a tenant’: Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsPlaying dead, however, is not merely a staging issue, though performance of a single character in two simultaneous but separate locations is a legitimate concern, both metaphysical and staging, since playing dead also poses eschatological and ontological challenges to neoplatonism, stoicism, and Christian theology, frameworks within which many Jacobean and revenge plays are conceived. -
‘An honest dog yet’: Performing The Witch of Edmonton
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsAt the climax of Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s 1621 tragedy The Witch of Edmonton, the devil treats a young morris dancer named Cuddy Banks to a discourse on the relationship between the everyday world in which Cuddy lives and the demonic realm over which he himself reigns. -
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. -
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). -
The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Toleration
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe relatively minor role torture played in the Gunpowder Plot investigation is a good example of the myths that surround this emotive subject. Permission was given to employ torture on Fawkes, who initially refused to say anything, but whether it was actually used and how much is unclear. -
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. -
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? -
Lessons from history: asylum patients’ Christmas experience
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhile it may be claimed that contemporary practice offers drug treatments and a wide range of therapeutic interventions unimaginable 150 years ago, it could also be argued that for all the advances in care and treatment the quality of life that patients experienced in the 19th century was, to some extent, superior. -
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. -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
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. -
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. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
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. -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
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. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
Becoming British? Navigating the Union of 1707
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will take one extended family, the Humes of the Merse (Berwickshire) and use it as a lens through which to view the process of “Brittification;” the four main areas addressed will be the legal, religious and educational ramifications of union for ambitious Scots and the issue of self-identification. -
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. -
Faith, Families, and Rebellion in Sixteenth-Century South-West England
Posted on October 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1549 rebellion occurred in the south-west of England during the period of significant religious change historians have traditionally called 'the English Reformation.' -
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. -
Oliver Cromwell : Man of Force
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsThere is no denying the fact that in many instances, Oliver Cromwell was in the right place at the most opportune time and that events often seemed to work in his favor through sheer luck, assuming that he had no hand in them. -
Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, edited by Anthony Fletcher
Posted on September 24, 2012 | No CommentsThese were hardly words which Charles wished to hear from his loyal subjects, and the king's displeasure was widely reported. The mayor's speech was not the only public pronouncement in the city on that day, however, and it may be that Charles' subsequent irritation arose more from knowledge of the other public criticism being voiced by the civic preachers. -
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. -
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. -
The ritual of the early modern death, 1550-1650
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsHowever, how did people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see death? -
“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. -
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. -
Protestant Bishops in Restoration England
Posted on September 7, 2012 | No CommentsCensure provoked defence; from the 1570s onwards, the English episcopate had faced various demands for further reform or else its total extirpation. -
The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn the families of the English gentry where the majority of the documented cases of demonic possession occurred, doctors played a significant role in interpreting strange and unusual illnesses. It was considered important to first rule out the possibility of natural causation when a supernatural affliction was suspected, and physicians were regarded as crucial in making the distinction. -
‘A Suffering People’: English Quakers and Their Neighbours c.1650–c.1700
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsPopular hostility towards Quakers has attracted little attention from historians. Studies of crowds and riots in the Restoration period make little mention of violence against Quakers -
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. -
The Duke’s Devil and Doctor Lambe’s Darling: A Case Study of the Male Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the early modern period in England changing economic patterns, religious reforms, and social relationships altered gender roles. While the role of women in English society has been well documented by scholars of the early modern period, there are few substantial studies of masculinity for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. -
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? -
The Most Dangerous Man in England
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe introduction of Darwinian theory and the many tandem theories that followed left Victorians with many questions. Further explained in Dennis O’Neil’s article entitled “Pre-Darwinian Theories,” as a result of Europe’s strong religious beliefs at the time, the majority of 17th- and 18th-century biology concentrated on the descriptions of living things rather than where they came from.