Literature And Political Intellection In Early Stuart England

Todd Butler charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined and effected political action. He draws upon a myriad of literary and political texts, including the work of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, and John Milton.

Drawing upon a myriad of literary and political texts, Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance—the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one's civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament—evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects alike imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, Todd Butler here investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the various ways that early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this continuing immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, Butler examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth-century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with similarly close readings of religious and political affairs that similarly return our attention to how early Stuart writers of all sorts understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, oaths, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how—or even if—one can freely think.

Kevin Sharpe reassesses the role that ideology, rhetoric and intellectual discussion played in the upheavals of seventeenth-century England.

This volume of essays explores the rise of parliament in the historical imagination of early modern England. The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes in early modern England - most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped the period's political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, shaping the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies. Since J. G. A. Pocock's brilliant The ancient constitution and the feudal law (1957), scholars have recognised that conceptions about the antiquity of England's parliamentary constitution - particularly its basis in common law - were a defining element of early Stuart political mentalities and ideological debates. The purpose of this volume is to explore the range of contemporary views of parliament's history and to trace their growing definition and prominence over the Tudor and early Stuart period. Historical culture is defined widely to include chronicles, more overtly 'literary' texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition. The volume restates the crucial role of institutions for understanding the political culture and thought of the early modern period. It will be of interest to students and scholars of the political, religious and intellectual history and literature of the early modern English-speaking world and Europe.

This important collection of essays, based on extensive original research, presents a vigorous critique of ` revisionist' analyses of the period, and reasserts the importance of long term ideological and social developments in causing the outbreak of the civil war.

A collection of essays addressing recent debates on the causes of the English Civil War.

Early Stuart England is one of the most intensively examined periods in English history. The outwardly successful reign of Elizabeth I gives way during the period to the breakdown of consensus, civil war, and eventually to the destruction of the monarchy itself. The reasons for this are hotly disputed. The tradional explanations have been challenged by the Revisionsts, whose own work is being challenged in its turn. book, therefore, is based on primary sources. Whilst the main focus is on politics and religion, the book also points to the significane of economic, social and cultural currents in the history of the period.

Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors demonstrate how the site, as well as the people and trades occupying the precinct, can be positioned within wider fields of representations, practices, and social networks. A focus on St Paul’s is therefore about more than just the specific site on Ludgate Hill: it is about those practices and representations connected to it, which either extended beyond or originated in places other than the Cathedral environs. This points to the range of localised, regional, national, and transnational relationships in which the precinct and its people were situated and to which they contributed.