Conscience and Context: the Popish Plot and the Politics of Ritual, 1678–1682

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Beaver

The Popish Plot is the proper starting point for a reassessment of society and culture in late seventeenth-century England. The origins of the plot have become increasingly obscure, primarily because historians have made the erosion of Calvinist religious values and belief a defining characteristic of social and political change after the Restoration. John Kenyon has argued that the plot was an instance of mass hysteria, with its roots in the overcrowded, rumour-infested environment of London. Having identified post-Restoration nonconformity with cranks mentally ‘unhinged’ by the civil wars and the Great Fire, Kenyon interprets the plot as an obvious fabrication foisted on a paranoid and credulous nation by adventurers and religious extremists. Christopher Hill, in rare agreement with Kenyon, sees the decline of the religious approach to politics until ‘by the time of the Popish Plot it had degenerated into a stunt manipulated by cynical politicians’.

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kurowiak

AbstractAs a work of propaganda, graphics Austroseraphicum Coelum Paulus Pontius should create a new reality, make appearances. The main impression while seeing the graphics is the admiration for the power of Habsburgs, which interacts with the power of the Mother of God. She, in turn, refers the viewer to God, as well as Franciscans placed on the graphic, they become a symbol of the Church. This is a starting point for further interpretation of the drawing. By the presence of certain characters, allegories, symbols, we can see references to a particular political situation in the Netherlands - the war with the northern provinces of Spain. The message of the graphic is: the Spanish Habsburgs, commissioned by the mission of God, they are able to fight all of the enemies, especially Protestants, with the help of Immaculate and the Franciscans. The main aim of the graphic is to convince the viewer that this will happen and to create in his mind a vision of the new reality. But Spain was in the seventeenth century nothing but a shadow of former itself (in the time of Philip IV the general condition of Spain get worse). That was the reason why they wanted to hold the belief that the empire continues unwavering. The form of this work (graphics), also allowed to export them around the world, and the ambiguity of the symbolic system, its contents relate to different contexts, and as a result, the Habsburgs, not only Spanish, they could promote their strength everywhere. Therefore it was used very well as a single work of propaganda, as well as a part of a broader campaign


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Ioan Pop-Curșeu

"Sexual Acts, Horror and Witchcraft in Cinema. The Copulation with the Devil: a Psychoanalytical Perspective. This paper tries to approach, taking as a starting point a Romanian painting from the 18th century, a scene with a strong phantasmatic load: the sexual act of a woman, who is considered a witch, with the devil. Several films are analyzed: Häxan by Benjamin Christensen (1922), Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski (1968), L’Anticristo by Alberto de Martino (1974), Angel above, Devil below by Dominic Bolla (1975). These films share some common features, important for the analytical process: the copulation with the devil, the presence of traumatized characters who are submitted to a psychological cure, the recycling of psychoanalytical vocabulary, especially “hysteria”, the problems with parental instances. In order to interpret these films, there is a coming back to Freud’s ideas on the Devil, as expressed in the letters to Wilhelm Fliess or in the study A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis (1923). The devil as an image of unconscious impulsions or as a substitute of the father are the main Freudian intuitions used here for an optimal interpretation of the chosen films. Keywords: sex, sexual act, horror, witchcraft, psychoanalysis, Freud, cinema. "


Author(s):  
Filip Pierzchalski

The aim of this paper is to conduct meta-analysis. The author will focus on explaining the multi-dimentional mechanism of aesthetisation of politics. In this understanding, the starting point for scientific explanation of the phenomenon of aesthetisation in public sphere is the mechanism of internalization, expression and sharing aesthetic values for individual and collective political actors. Therefore, aesthetic values in political practices will be defined as crucial factor of political change and meaningful element of shaping social structure. In this matter the article undertakes the following issues: the notion of aesthetic experience; aestethis values and their political functions of public sphere; the mechanism of politicization of aesthetic values.


1948 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Arthur Johnson

The period of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth in England was one of the most momentous epochs in British history. For small groups of people the decade of the 1640's inaugurated a New Age—an age in which the Holy Spirit reigned triumphant. Such believers reached the zenith of Puritan “spiritualism,” or that movement which placed the greatest emphasis upon the Third Person of the Trinity.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-565
Author(s):  
KATE LOVEMAN

Reading, society and politics in early modern England. Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix+363. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. £50.00.The politics of information in early modern Europe. Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viii+310. ISBN 0-415-20310-4. £75.00.Literature, satire and the early Stuart state. By Andrew McRae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+250. ISBN 0-521-81495-2. £45.00.The writing of royalism, 1628–1660. By Robert Wilcher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+403. ISBN 0-521-66183-8. £45.00.Politicians and pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum. By Jason Peacey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xi+417. ISBN 0-7546-0684-8. £59.95.The ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration publicist. By Lois G. Schwoerer. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii+349. ISBN 0-8018-6727-4. £32.00.In 1681 the Italian newswriter Giacomo Torri incurred the wrath of the French ambassador to the Venetian Republic with his anti-French reporting. The ambassador ordered Torri to ‘cease and desist or be thrown into the canal’. Torri, who was in the pay of the Holy Roman Emperor, responded to the ambassador's threat with a report that ‘the king of France had fallen from his horse, and that this was a judgement of God’. Three of the ambassadors' men were then found attacking Torri ‘by someone who commanded them to stop in the name of the Most Excellent Heads of the Council of Ten … but they replied with certain vulgarities, saying they knew neither heads nor councils’. Discussed by Mario Infelise in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron's collection, this was a very minor feud in the seventeenth-century battles over political information, but it exemplifies several of the recurring themes of the books reviewed here. First, the growing recognition by political authorities across Europe that news was a commodity worthy of investment. Secondly, the variety of official and unofficial sanctions applied in an attempt to control the market for news publications. Thirdly, the recalcitrance of writers and publishers in the face of these sanctions: whether motivated by payment or principle, disseminators of political information showed great resourcefulness in frustrating attempts to limit their activities. These six books investigate aspects of seventeenth-century news and politics or, alternatively, seventeenth-century literature and politics – the distinction between ‘news’ and certain literary genres being, as several of these authors show, often difficult to make.


2020 ◽  
pp. 121-147
Author(s):  
Henri Myrttinen

The visual landscape of Lebanon both mirrors and reasserts the country’s complex socio-political, economic and gendered order. Using public memorialisations of the dead in the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars as a starting point, the chapter analyses how these reflect Lebanese realities and imaginaries, and how particular militarised masculinities are constructed through them. The chapter then contrasts these visualisations with the invisibilisation of conflict-related disabilities and the war-wounded and what these mean for the reproduction of gendered and other social hierarchies.


Author(s):  
Peter Hinds

This chapter discusses the activities of Parliament in relation to Catholics during the first few months following the plot revelations. One section looks at the representations of Catholics and Catholicism in pamphlet discourse. Many tropes of anti-Catholicism during the late seventeenth century that impacted upon the credibility of Oates' Popish Plot are taken into account. The importance of the representation of Catholics and Catholicism and how this representation could work to stimulate and sustain belief in the Popish Plot are discussed.


2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.


Author(s):  
Roberto Niembro Ortega

In 2018 Mexicans chose the most profound political change since the transition to democracy. The alternation between political parties in the presidency and the two houses of Congress has meant a change of regime in which a social transformation is announced. The starting point to outlining a constitutional transformation is not a trivial matter, because the proposed change concerns the existing situation. This chapter proposes Roberto Niembro Ortega’s understanding of authoritarian constitutionalism according to the Mexican reality between 2012 and 2018. Its purpose is to understand the sort of authoritarian constitutionalism that existed in those years in Mexico as a starting point to begin a constitutional transformation.


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