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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... -
Brewers’ tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsBrewers' tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700 James R. Brown Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract For some years now early modernists have been... -
Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsAn investigation of the editions of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is an exciting subject in itself, but a comparison of the first French and English translations throws remarkable light upon the parallel developments of the two countries in Renaissance literary history. -
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. -
Changing Fortunes during the Fifteenth Century Recession
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsHow far did the fifteenth-century recession change the relationship between landlords and tenants in Durham? There can be little doubt that this was a period of hardship for landowners. -
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. -
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. -
‘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’. -
Renaissance plays as a useful source for the comparison between English and Croatian early modern medicine
Posted on January 3, 2013 | No CommentsAs Renaissance made no particular distinction between arts and sciences, plays of that time provide a very common source of medical narrative. -
Nonsuch Palace
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsDavid Gaimster recalls the excavation of Henry VIII’s most extravagant palace, which spawned the discipline of post-medieval archaeology. -
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. -
“The Nightmare in Early Modern England.”
Posted on December 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was held at Victoria College by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and dealt with the idea of the nightmare and its evolution from demonic possession to medical malady. -
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. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
The Pageant of History: Nostalgia, the Tudors, and the Community Play
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the first half of the twentieth century, although these events have attracted little scholarly attention to date, English cathedral cities, market towns and hamlets put on a large number of historical pageants, habitually preoccupied with what the English think of as the Tudor period. -
Songs and society in early Tudor London
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsBy comparison, far less attention has been made to recreational music making in the urban communities of early Tudor England, and to musical experiences that lay beyond court, college, cathedral and church. -
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... -
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. -
“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. -
Gender Equality in Wage Labour Relations: the example of statutory regulation in late medieval and early Tudor England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe first question, not yet raised in labour historiography, is about the impact of wage labour relations on gender equality. The second question is related to the first one: what role did women play as protagonists of wage labour relations. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
A Homelie Herbe: Medicinal Cannabis in Early England
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsTransformed almost overnight from outlaw to commercial opportunity, cannabis is the sub- ject of urgent investigation on the part of commercial scientists, as companies on both sides of the Atlantic scramble to patent profitable analogues. I suggest that a rational consideration of its venerable history in England, coupled with the evidence of its therapeutic properties (newly confirmed in the language of biochemistry), leads to the inescapable conclusion that the prohibition of medicinal cannabis in England is an historical anomaly that should be rectified as soon as possible. -
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. -
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. -
John Jarret and Roaring Dick of Dover: Popular Attitudes toward Drinking in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay argues that a certain type of source, the seventeenth-century broadside ballad, may provide some insight into the attitudes held toward drinking by those at the lower end of the social scale. -
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. -
An arbor of one’s own? Aemilia Lanyer and the early modern garden
Posted on June 13, 2012 | No CommentsGardens, women, and poetry had long been associated in sixteenth-cen- tury verse written by men, typically as sources of analogous pleasures. Num- erous lyric mistresses walk or sit among cultured flowers that mirror their charms, enticing viewers’ senses to more or less unsettling effect. -
“Only your picture in my mind”: the image, the heart, and the mirror in some seventeenth-century poems
Posted on June 13, 2012 | No CommentsWhen Marvell crisply invites Clora to “Come view my soul” in “The Gallery” and assures her that all she will find there is images of herself, he is com- menting on a long tradition of looking-glass poems in which a woman’s image is engraved on the lover’s heart. Such poems employ a rhetoric of persuasion to lure the woman away from her mirror. In the mid seventeenth-century, these poems, with their debts to Continental writers, are found predominantly (and consistently) in the works of Royalist poets. -
“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. -
Astrological prognostications in MS Beinecke 558: “Sonday prime drye wether”
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsThe manuscript I will focus on in this thesis is known as New Haven, Yale University MS Beinecke 558 (henceforth Beinecke 558). It is currently located in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. -
The Cultural and Ideological Significance of Representations of Boudica During the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James I
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsFascinated by the British myth of Boudica I began my research into her life and times with the ambition of writing a story. Curious to know what others before me had produced in this field I started to look at representations of Boudica by other historical novelists. I also wanted to understand how the historical Boudica of 60 AD had been transfigured over the years into the icon we have of her today. -
Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsThis image of Elizabeth invites comparison and contrast with the body of Henry VIII, famously portrayed by Holbein as an icon of masculinity and power, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. -
Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe present study may be regarded as treating upon those attitudes to the past and its relationship to the present generally discussed under the rubric of the conflict of the Ancients and the Moderns. -
‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England
Posted on April 29, 2012 | No CommentsSumptuary legislation can be defined as a set of regulations, passed down by legislators through statutory law and parliamentary proclamations, that sought to regulate society by dictating what contemporaries could own or wear based on their position within society. -
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... -
A Crisis in Regal Identity: The Dichotomy Between Levinia Teerlinc’s (1520-1576) Private and Public Images of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsTeerlinc’s career began with an invitation to serve as official court painter to Henry VIII (1491-1547). After his death in 1554, she worked for Edward VI (1547-1553), Mary I (1516-1558), and finally Elizabeth I (1533-1603). -
High crimes: the law of treason in late Stuart Britain
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsThis is the first work on treason to concentrate exclusively on the all important years between the Restoration and the Union, when the number of trials for this most serious of all crimes reached new heights and during which time the procedural law of treason underwent significant changes. -
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. -
Ophelia’s Mistreatment and Ignored Monastic Opportunities
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsAn examination of her relationship with Polonius and Laertes will culminate with an inspection of the relationship between Ophelia and Laertes, using the feminist theory employed by Virginia Wolf -
The Role of Charles I in the Evolution of Taste and Collecting in England
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsCharles and his courtiers brought to England, for the first time, the awareness of taste and the development of collecting habits similar to those in continental Europe. -
Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon
Posted on October 14, 2011 | No CommentsEarly Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon Cressy, David The American Historical Review, Vol. III, No. 4, October (2006) Abstract The moon, for early modern Englishmen...