Shakespeare’s Commonwealth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rollison
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Political Ideal ◽  
English Constitutional History ◽  
Constitutional Legitimacy

This chapter examines the existence in England from the thirteenth century of the political ideal of ‘commonwealth’: the overarching principle, dominating the political thought of commoners, that the constitutional legitimacy of any government lay not in heredity or a mystic theology of authority but in its consultation with subjects and pursuit of the well-being of the entire people. Numerous medieval rebellions had risen with ‘the commonweal’ as their rallying cry, and Kett’s rebels of 1549 were likewise termed ‘commonwealths’. In Tudor England, ‘commonwealth’ was consequently a term coloured by subversive connotation, yet pervasive in political discourse as an honorific concept. The chapter shows this ambivalence to inhere in Shakespeare’s engagements with the word. Yet no one did more, it claims, in the generations before the English Revolution, to publicize this basic, yet too often ignored tenet of English constitutional history.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

scholarly journals The English Civil Parish

1916 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Benson Botts
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Special Functions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Special Studies ◽  
English Nationalism ◽  
English Constitutional History ◽  
Source Of Information

English constitutional history, since the beginning of the political revolution in the seventeenth century, has been the subject of study of every civilized nation. This wide spread interest has resulted in a thorough search through English documents for every available source of information. There is however one field of English insitutuional history that has received little attention, that is the development of English vivil parish before the seventeenth century. The origin of the parish in both civil and ecclesiastical forms has recieved some notice from the older constitutional writers, and recently has been made the subject of special studies. The Elizabethan parish has been fully treated in the general works and in monographs dealing with special functions. However, no writer has attempted to trace the consecutive development of the civil parish from its origin to the heighth of its activity in the seventeenth century. This development is peculiarly important from the standpoint of the growth of English nationalism, yet is has been entirely overlooked. (1)

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Körner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Source Materials

This book examines the extent to which the United States' political experience influenced the political thought and imagination of the Risorgimento during the period 1763–1865. Drawing on various source materials such as early Italian histories of the American Republic, parliamentary documents, memoirs, and correspondence, the book shows how abstract political ideas were reflected in Italy's wider cultural imagination from the end of the Seven Years' War in the early 1760s to the American Civil War a century later, which coincided with the Unification of Italy under the crown of Savoy. It argues that Italian ideas of the United States during the period of the Risorgimento were not blind admiration for American political experiments. Instead, Italians engaged with what they knew about the early Republic in relation to their own constitutional history, as well as to a whole range of different European experiences.

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