Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 261-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Convicted Felons ◽  
The Church

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Matthias Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Alternative Concept ◽  
The Church

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

AN OPEN ELITE: THE PECULIARITIES OF CONNOISSEURSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

Thomas Fuller

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church History ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Long considered a distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) has not been recognized as the important historian he was. Fuller’s The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first history of Christianity from its planting in ancient Britain to the mid-seventeenth century. Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662) was, moreover, the first biographical dictionary in England. It seeks to represent noteworthy individuals in the context of their native counties. This book, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past, highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. It provides a biography of Thomas Fuller, an account of the tumultuous times in which he lived, and a critical assessment of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history, a genre to which he made significant and lasting contributions. Memory is a central theme. Widely known for his own memory, Fuller sought to revive the memory of the English people concerning their religious and political past. By means of historical research involving records, books, personal interviews, and travels, he sought to discover his country’s religious past and to bring it to the attention of his fellow English men and women, who might thereby be enabled to rebuild their shattered Church and nation.

scholarly journals The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dramatic Rise

Abstract This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners, and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 1550–1624, and its role in discourses to do with social regulation, negative evaluation and moralizing. The other is to undertake a detailed comparison of Della Casa’s Galateo and, in particular, Brown and Levinson (1987). The major finding here is the close similarity between the two. Along the way, the paper also airs some theoretical distinctions relating to notions of politeness, notably the distinction between first- and second-order politeness, and touches on some of the features of the social context of Early Modern England.

The Correction Court in the Diocese of Carlisle, 1704–1756

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kinnear
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts

Many twentieth-century historians of early modern England have assumed that ecclesiastical jurisdication was a lost cause after the Restoration, and thus, in contrast to earlier periods, there has been little research on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. However, an examination of the Correction Court records for the Diocese of Carlisle between 1704 and 1758 and a summary survey of other dioceses suggest that such archives may prove useful for historians. This article uses the Carlisle Correction Court archive to study the charges which were brought to the court in the first half of the eighteenth century and, after a brief description of the social and economic setting, looks at the characteristics of the people brought to book.

Discursive diversity in the textual articulation of epidemic disease in Early Modern England

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Seargeant
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Social Response ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Discourses ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This article provides a detailed examination of the way in which the social response to epidemic disease in Early Modern England was constructed through discourse, and of how a matrix of meanings for the 'plague' was promoted to fill the conceptual gap between experience and social understanding. It analyses the variety of textual genres that were used to articulate this response, from the sermon tradition to prose pamphlets and the bills of mortality, and considers the dialogic nature of the interaction between these genres and how this facilitated the spread and generation of metaphoric associations for the disease. The article also considers the way in which this discourse itself is structured, and how it is marked by diversity and heterogeneity; it contends that rather than there being a clear hierarchy of dominant and 'alternative' discourses, it is more an unstable equilibrium of competing explanations. In part, this diversity is a result of plural and competing meanings being ascribed to the disease; in part, it is due to the range of different voices eager to promote their own opinion. This results in multiplicity not just of 'product', but also of 'process', with different genres and institutional centres of power (including the church, the civic authorities, the publishing industry) all claiming authority over the prescription of meaning. In this way the discourse itself becomes disordered, as there is no major controlling influence, and the structure of the discourse can be seen to reflect iconically the very themes that it articulates.

KINGSHIP AND COUNSEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE ROSE
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political System ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Political ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Advice Giving ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

ABSTRACTCounsel was central to negotiating the politics of Reformation monarchy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In a personal monarchy, particularly one wherein the monarch was supreme governor of the church, shaping the character of the ruler was vital for the smooth functioning of the political system. This article provides a conspectus of a broader project on early modern kingship and counsel which will discuss advice-giving provided by privy councillors, parliaments, preachers, and courtiers between 1509 and 1689. It shows how ecclesiastical counsel was central to defenders of the established church and in absolutist theorizing, and how men between 1558 and 1688 drew on patristic examples of its practice. Comparing ecclesiastical counsel to other genres of advice-giving also shows their common and distinctive features.

scholarly journals “The gully-hole of literature”: On the enregisterment of cant language in seventeenth-century England.

Sederi ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-117
Author(s):  
Paula Schintu
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Population ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

This essay places seventeenth-century literary renditions of cant, the language spoken by rogues and criminals in Early Modern England, into the context of “enregisterment” so as to examine its role in the process of recognition, categorization and legitimation of the canting tongue and the values it entailed. Literary representations of this variety became common in the period under analysis as a result of the criminal element that threatened the English population. Drama emerged as one of the main vehicles for the representation of cant, leading to the appearance of numerous plays that dealt with the life and adventures of English rogues. In the pages that follow, it will be argued that the study of these textual artefacts can provide valuable historical insight into the use of cant and the social connotations associated with it. In fact, the corpus-based analysis of the plays selected for this study has made it possible to identify both a common lexical repertoire and a set of sociocultural features that were associated with this underworld variety and its wicked speakers by the London non-canting audience. At the same time, it has shed light on the processes whereby this encoded speech came to index derogatory cultural values, which were spread and consumed thanks, in part, to dramatic performance, leading to the enregisterment of cant language and its recognition as a stable and unique linguistic variety.

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