scholarly journals CONTESTED LEGITIMACY AND THE AMBIGUOUS RISE OF VESTRIES IN EARLY MODERN LONDON

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. MERRITT
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Early Modern London

ABSTRACTStudies of the rise of London's vestries in the period to 1640 have tended to discuss them in terms of the inexorable rise of oligarchy and state formation. This article re-examines the emergence of the vestries in several ways, moving beyond this traditional focus on oligarchy, and noting how London's vestries raised much broader issues concerning law, custom, and lay religious authority. The article reveals a notable contrast between the widespread influence and activities of London vestries and the questionable legal framework in which they operated. The political and ecclesiastical authorities – and in particular Archbishop Laud – are also shown to have had very mixed attitudes towards the legitimacy and desirability of powerful vestries. The apparently smooth and relentless spread of select vestries in the pre-war period is also shown to be illusory. The granting of vestry ‘faculties’ by the authorities ceased abruptly at the end of the 1620s, amid a series of serious legal challenges, on both local and ideological grounds, to the existence of vestries. Their rise had thus been seriously contested and stymied well before the upheavals of the 1640s, although opposition to them came from multiple sources – Laudians, Henry Spelman and the royal Commission on Fees, and local parishioners – whose objectives could vary.

Stolen Skin and Children Thrown: Governing sex and abortion in early modern South Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
DIVYA CHERIAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
State And Society

Abstract What did women's bodies in pre-colonial South Asia have to do with the birth of capitalism? South Asia's pre-colonial integration into a globally emerging, early modern capitalist order reached deep into the hinterland to transform both state and society in eighteenth-century Marwar. Driving the change was an emergent elite, consisting largely of merchants, that channelled its energies towards reshaping caste. Merchants, in alliance with Brahmans, used their influence upon the state to adjudicate the boundary between the ‘illicit’ and the ‘licit,’ generating in the process a typology and an archive of deviant sex. In the legal framework that generated this archive, women were configured as passive recipients of sexual acts, lacking sexual personhood in law. Even as they escaped legal culpability for ‘illicit’ sex, women experienced, through this body of judgments, a strengthening of male proprietary controls over their bodies. Alongside, the criminalization of abortion served as a means of sexual disciplining. These findings suggest that post-Mughal, pre-colonial state formation in South Asia intersected with global economic transformations to generate new sex-caste orders and archival bodies.

Indian Petitioning and Colonial State-Formation in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT TRAVERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modified Forms

AbstractThis article explores the role of Indian petitioning in the process of consolidating British power after the East India Company's military conquest of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The presentation of written petitions (often termed‘arziin Persian) was a pervasive form of state-subject interaction in early modern South Asia that carried over, in modified forms, into the colonial era. The article examines the varied uses of petitioning as a technology of colonial state-formation that worked to establish the East India Company's headquarters in Calcutta as the political capital of Bengal and the Company as a sovereign source of authority and justice. It also shows how petitioning became a site of anxiety for both colonial rulers and Indian subjects, as British officials struggled to respond to a mass of Indian ‘complaints’ and to satisfy the expectations and norms of justice expressed by petitioners. It suggests that British rulers tried to defuse the perceived political threat of Indian petitioning by redirecting petitioners into the newly regulated spaces of an emergent colonial judiciary.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

Our universities away from partisan Altsarat

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
أ.د.عبد الجبار احمد عبد الله
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Office ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The University

In order to codify the political and partisan activity in Iraq, after a difficult labor, the Political Parties Law No. (36) for the year 2015 started and this is positive because it is not normal for the political parties and forces in Iraq to continue without a legal framework. Article (24) / paragraph (5) of the law requires that the party and its members commit themselves to the following: (To preserve the neutrality of the public office and public institutions and not to exploit it for the gains of a party or political organization). This is considered because it is illegal to exploit State institutions for partisan purposes . It is a moral duty before the politician not to exploit the political parties or some of its members or those who try to speak on their behalf directly or indirectly to achieve partisan gains. Or personality against other personalities and parties at the expense of the university entity.

[I] ‘did write this Wyll with my own hand’

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Markidou
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
First Time ◽  
Shed Light

This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.

Speaking for Islam

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-127
Author(s):  
Abdoulaye Sounaye
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
Islamic Values ◽  
French Model

Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.

Propaganda as a means of implementing the ideological function of the state

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Aleksey Bredikhin ◽  
Andrei Udaltsov
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Feedback System ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Position ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Mass Media

In the article the authors analyze the essence of propaganda as a means of implementing ideological function of the state. It is noted that propaganda is a mechanism of spreading information persuasive influence in the interpretation and estimation of state power representatives. The structure of propaganda is determined: beneficiary of propaganda, subjects of propaganda, content of propaganda, channels of realization of propaganda, addressee of propaganda, feedback system. Types of propaganda are distinguished: political, axiological, educational, preventive. The authors come to the conclusion that the basic directions and the propaganda content are established in normative acts and the programs and organizational actions accepted according to them. Along with the implementation of propaganda, the ideological function is implemented by prohibiting or restricting propaganda or other dissemination of information that endangers the foundations of the constitutional order and is otherwise aimed at destabilizing the political situation in the State, as well as prohibiting the propaganda of ideas that may harm the foundations of morality and morality. The mass media are essential in carrying out propaganda. The State widely uses this resource on an equal footing with other actors to disseminate ideas of public importance and uses the services of various communication agencies. However, the state forms a legal framework for the mass media, their rights and limitations, which still determines the special position of the state in this process.

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