Family matters and Foxe's Acts and Monuments

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Andrew Penny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Critical Juncture ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Acts And Monuments

ABSTRACTThis essay maintains that John Foxe has been under-utilized as a source of early modern English social history. Accordingly, the mid-Tudor portions of the Acts and monuments of Foxe are examined with reference to such topics as the size of early modern families, the roles of spouses within marriage, the status of romantic love and marriage, and the treatment of children. In addition to these familiar categories, however, the essay also asks whether the protestant community of the Marian era was forming a coherent vision of the family as part of its strategy of survival, and whether the catholic authorities were aware of this and attempted to thwart its development. The possibility of a connection between the protestant emphasis on rediscovering the heart of the Christian gospel and a renewed emphasis on the biblical vision of family is raised, together with a discussion of the English reformers' concern that families not serve as hindrances in the advancement of the kingdom of God at that critical juncture in the life of the nation.

Early Modern English Borders: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Boyi Chen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Channel Islands ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Case

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border ‘building’ was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a ‘nation’, which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a ‘state’.

Officeholding and Local Politics in Early Modern Wales: A Study of the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, c. 1536–1621

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadie Jarrett
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status

Officeholding was a defining ascpect of early modern Welsh gentility and was more prominent in upholding the status and authority of the Welsh gentry than it was for their English counterparts. Using a case study of the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, this article analyses the importance of officeholding to the Welsh gentry after the Acts of Union (1536 and 1543). It finds that the Salesburys were effective local administrators who understood how to use officeholding to enhance their status in their community. At the same time, the family were not isolated in the localities and they continually engaged with the agents of central government.

Domestic Homicide in early modern England

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

One of the most striking features of recent writing on early modern social history has been the emergence of the family as a subject of central concern. As befits an historical area being subjected to new scrutiny, much of this concern has expressed itself in the form of specialized, and often narrowly-focused articles or essays.1 To these have been added a number of more general works intended to examine the broader developments in and implications of family life in the past.2 Several themes within family history have already received considerable attention: the structure of the family, for example, a topic already rendered familiar by earlier work on historical demography; the concomitant topic of sexual practices and attitudes; and the economic role of the family, especially in its capacity as a unit of production. These are, of course, important matters, and the research carried out on them has revealed much of interest and consequence to the social historian; this should not, however, obscure the existence of a number of other significant dimensions of family life in the past which await thorough investigation.

The Perraults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Language ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Family Strategies

Through the story of the Perraults, a family of literary and scientific authors active in seventeenth-century Paris, the book argues that kinship networks played a crucial yet unexamined role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of seventeenth-century France, while showing how culture in its turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. The book examines the world of letters as means of social mobility and revises our understanding of prominent early modern institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as authorship and court capitalism. Put together, this project serves as a catalyst for rethinking early modern cultural and intellectual institutions more broadly. In this view, institutions no longer appear as rigid entities that embody or define intellectual or literary styles, such as “Cartesianism,” “empiricism” or “the purity of the French language.” Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies and practices of writing, thereby reframing their relation to the state.

British Society in the Eighteenth Century

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-466
Author(s):  
Robert Allan Houston
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
British Society ◽  
British History ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Structure Education

The volume of publications on social history in the last decade has been enormous. The Royal Historical Society'sAnnual Bibliography of British Historycontains hundreds of new items each year, so many that keeping up with the latest research is almost impossible except within limited fields. The very quantity of material is a testament to the success of what has been termed the “new social history.” Taking as its focus the lives of the masses, this approach employs concepts and techniques drawn from cognate disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and statistics to uncover the rich complexity of everyday life in the past. New interests, new methods, and a fresh look at underused primary sources: these are the hallmarks. This is not to say that it is a homogeneous “movement” since there are vigorous debates about central issues such as the use of theory and about the correct balance between quantification and traditional qualitative, intuitive approaches.The new social history has had a profound effect on the way in which all historians deal with their subject and even on its critics. That social history has arrived as a leader in historical analysis is amply attested by G. R. Elton's recent call to political historians not to accept reduction to the status of its poor cousins. The subject's position is assured, and its achievements have been substantial. This article deals with the main areas of research in social history: population, social structure, education and literacy, women, religion, and the family.

Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176
Author(s):  
James P. Bednarz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Marston ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
Public Theater

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.

A witty, learned persecutor? The staged after-life of Thomas More

Moreana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (Number 181- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Paul Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Acts and Monuments, John Foxe proposed a double vision of More – ‘witty and learned’ and, as Foxe is at pains to demonstrate, ‘a bitter persecutor … a wretched enemy against the truth of the Gospel’. This duality is expanded on the early modern stage. In a series of plays, we find a compartmentalised vision of More, one in which controversial aspects of his life and career are sometimes suppressed. The late Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences of these texts witnessed the overt reconstruction of More as judge and wit, and the covert appearance of More as traitor, martyr and persecutor.

Officeholding and Local Politics in Early Modern Wales: A Study of the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, c. 1536–1621

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-232
Author(s):  
Sadie Jarrett
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status

Officeholding was a defining ascpect of early modern Welsh gentility and was more prominent in upholding the status and authority of the Welsh gentry than it was for their English counterparts. Using a case study of the Salesburys of Rhug and Bachymbyd, this article analyses the importance of officeholding to the Welsh gentry after the Acts of Union (1536 and 1543). It finds that the Salesburys were effective local administrators who understood how to use officeholding to enhance their status in their community. At the same time, the family were not isolated in the localities and they continually engaged with the agents of central government.

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