The King S Bedpost

A fascinating and lavishly-illustrated detective story about the allegorical painting Edward VI and the Pope.

In the political ferment of the Tudor century one family above all others was always at the troubled centre of court and council. During those years the Dudleys were never far from controversy. Three of them were executed for treason. They were universally condemned as scheming, ruthless, over-ambitious charmers, and one was defamed as a wife murderer. Yet Edmund Dudley was instrumental in establishing the financial basis of the Tudor dynasty, and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, led victorious armies, laid the foundations of the Royal Navy, ruled as uncrowned king and almost succeeded in placing Lady Jane Grey on the throne. The most famous of them all, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, came the closest to marrying Elizabeth I, was her foremost favourite for 30 years and governed the Netherlands in her name, while his successor, Sir Robert Dudley, was one of the Queen's most audacious seadogs in the closing years of her reign, but fell foul of James I. Thus the fortunes of this astonishing family rose and fell with those of the royal line they served faithfully through a tumultuous century. see www.derekwilson.com

Some of England's most fascinating Renaissance texts have been forgotten by historians, literary critics and theologians alike. The earliest printed Bibles in the English language provide an astonishingly rich resource for interdisciplinary studies in the 21st century. Long Travail and Great Paynes is a close textual analysis of seven texts that for a wide range of reasons, but no good ones, have been reduced to paratextual entries in general histories of the English Bible. Through extensive collations of her own, Westbrook uncovers the work of seven Renaissance Bible translator-revisers and argues forcefully for a new agenda to replace the outmoded and inappropriate one of evaluating Renaissance Bibles according to the extent of their influence on the 1611 King James Authorised Version. Every sixteenth-century text reflects something of the historical dynamic in which it was created, and English Renaissance Bibles, with their ever-changing text and paratext, have their own unique stories to tell.

This book offers a reappraisal of the kingship and politics of the reign of Edward VI, the third Tudor king of England who reigned from the age of nine in 1547 until his death in 1553. The reign has often been interpreted as a period of political instability, mainly because of Edward's age, but this account challenges the view that the king's minority was a time of political faction. It shows how Edward was shaped and educated from the start for adult kingship, and how Edwardian politics evolved to accommodate a maturing and able young king. The book also explores the political values of the men around the king, and tries to reconstruct the relationships of family and association that bound together the governing elite in the king's Council, his court, and in the universities. It also assesses the impact of Edward's reign on Elizabethan politics.

A reappraisal of Lope's literary career, bringing out the complexities of his dramatic texts. This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Lope's theatre, which will affect the way in which the comedia in general is read. It spans Lope's literary career, discussing (pseudo-)historical, tragic and peasant plays in order to show Lope's texts as complex negotiations between author and public, between conservatism and subversion, between representations of the ideal of kingship and its political reality, in a period of social and political change. Drawing on contemporary Spanish political philosophy, McKendrick shows that far from glorifying monarchy and advocating absolutism (the orthodox view in the Hispanic world), Lope's political plays constitute an informed critiqueof kingship; she also challenges the received wisdom that the comedia was an instrument of stage and that its playwrights were the conscious propagandists of an aristocratic elite. With the help of insights and models provided by the speech act theory, the stratagems and techniques utilised by Lope to follow the path of prudence between the acceptable and the unacceptable in political commentary in the commercial theatre are scrutinised, illustrating how richly nuanced texts produce not an ideologically monolithic and complacent drama but one which is at once politically anxious and probing. MELVEENA MCKENDRICK is Professor of Spanish Literature, Culture and Societyat the University of Cambridge.

P. 275-357 : les éditions genevoises au 16e siècle de la Bible en anglais.

This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.