European Historiography in English Political Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Popper
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Empirical Information ◽  
Methods And Techniques ◽  
Interpretive Model ◽  
English Politics

Historical study flourished in early modern Europe, as scholars and counselors adapted venerable genres and modes of analysis and devised new methods and techniques. Their works intended to advance political ends by augmenting their readers’ strategic acumen, familiarizing them with recent events, or deciphering broad providential patterns at work. Early modern England witnessed the importation of every significant form of historical work produced in this period, and these methods came to occupy a central, if variegated, place in its political culture. Above all, the interpretive model of ‘politic history’ and the techniques of continental antiquarianism became powerful ways to intervene in English politics, and editions, translations, and adaptations were disseminated by those both endorsing and challenging royal policy. At the same time, other readers plumbed their histories for empirical information, hoping that their mastery of foreign lands would earn them advancement within the regime.

The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England

1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cressy
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Current Time ◽  
Traditional Calendar ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Stuart England

Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts the English developed a relationship to time—current time within the cycle of the year and historical time with reference to the past—that set them apart from the rest of early modern Europe. All countries followed a calendar that was rooted in the rhythms of ancient Europe and that marked the passage of time by reference to the life of Christ and his saints. But only in England was this traditional calendar of Christian holidays augmented by special days honoring the Protestant monarch and the ordeals and deliverances of the national church. In addition to regulating the seasons of work and worship, the calendar in England served as a reminder of the nation's distinctiveness, of God's mercies, and of England's particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Other Protestant communities, most notably the Dutch, enjoyed a comparable myth of historical exceptionalism—a replay of the Old Testament—but no other nation employed the calendar as the English did to express and represent their identity. Early modern England, in this regard, had more in common with modern America, France, or Australia (with Independence Day, Bastille Day, Australia Day, etc.), than with the rest of post-Reformation Europe.This article deals with changes in calendar consciousness and annual festive routines in Elizabethan and Stuart England. It examines the rise of Protestant patriotism, and the shaping of a national political culture whose landmarks were royal anniversaries, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. It opens a discussion on the vocabulary of celebration and the degree to which festivity was sponsored and orchestrated in the interest of national consolidation or partisan position. And it will show how calendrical observances that at first helped unite the crown and nation became contentious, politicized, and divisive.

Brabantia: decoding the main characters of Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (Number 187- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Maarten M.K. Vermeir
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political System ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Home Town ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
Political Thinker

In this study, we propose a new understanding, according to the principles of ‘humanistic interpretation’, of a fundamental layer of meaning in Utopia. In the work of Thomas More, major references can be found to the particular genesis and a crucial purpose of Utopia. Desiderius Erasmus arranged the acquaintance of Thomas More with Peter Giles, a key figure in the development of Erasmus as political thinker. More and Giles together in Antwerp (Giles’s home town), both jurists and humanists, would lay the foundation of Utopia. With this arranged contact, Erasmus handed over to More the knowledge of a particular political system - the earliest form of ‘parliamentary democracy’ in Early modern Europe - embedded in the political culture of the Duchy of Brabant and its constitution, named the ‘Joyous Entry’. We argue that Erasmus, through the indispensable politicalliterary skills of More in Utopia, intended to promote this political system as a new, political philosophy: applicable to all nations in the Respublica Christiana of Christian humanism. With reference to this genesis of Utopia in the text itself and its prefatory letters, we come to a clear recognition of Desiderius Erasmus in the figure of Raphael Hythlodaeus, the sailor who had discovered the ‘isle of Utopia’ and discoursed, as reported by More, about its ‘exemplary’ institutions.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

The Cartographic Image of ‘The Country’ in Early Modern England

1979 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
The Common

Some four hundred years ago this month Stephen Limbert, master of Norwich School, stood before the gates of the Great Hospital and addressed his well-turned Latin phrases to an audience almost as eminent as that gathered here today. Elizabeth I and her mobile summer court were on progress, and Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and capital of a region that was both the agricultural and manufacturing heartland of England, was determined to impress its monarch with both its loyalty to the Tudor dynasty and its contribution to the common weal—so it hired an impecunious London hack, sometime soldier and court hanger-on, Thomas Churchyard, to write the script. In part, at least, this no doubt accounts for the frequently reiterated commonplaces of Elizabethan propaganda embodied in such of those pageants and speeches as survived the intermittent downpours that sent both Her Majesty and her municipal hosts scurrying for cover on more than one occasion during her visit. Neither did Master Limbert's disquisition differ in its enthusiasm for Elizabethan rule from those of his metropolitan confrère. ‘It is reported’, he told Her Majesty, ‘that Aegypte is watered with the yerely overflowing of the Nilus, and Lydia with the golden streame of Pactolus, whyche thing is thought to be the cause of the greate fertilytye of these countries: but uppon us, and farther, over all Englande, even into the uttermoste borders, many and maine rivers of godlynesse, justice and humilitie, and other inumerable good things … do most plentifully gush out … from that continuall and most aboundaunt welspring of your goodnesse … With what prayses shall wee extoll, with what magnificent wordes shall we expresse, that notable mercie of your Highnesse, most renowned Queene’, sentiments that earned the former Norwich schoolmaster the Queen's invitation to kiss her ungloved hands, and sentiments that direct our attention to the symbols and image-creating aspects of the political culture of renaissance England.

Whose Saint Crispins Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-Part2) ◽  
pp. 1467-1494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison A. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
English Politics

This article demonstrates an early modern association between the trade of shoemaking and the act of altering the festal calendar. It traces this link through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary texts including Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and — most notably — Henry V. The article argues that the depictions of cobblers making holidays resonated with the early modern English politics of ritual observance, and its concluding discussion of the Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows how the play imagines king and cobblers vying for control of England's commemorative practice.

Neither ancient nor modern: Wallis and Barrow on the composition of continua. Part one: Mathematical styles and the composition of continua

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Mathematical Ideas ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Mathematical Techniques ◽  
John Wallis ◽  
Geometric Mode ◽  
Regius Professor

John Wallis and Isaac Barrow were key figures in a transitional period in the development of mathematics in early modern England: their work reveals a tension between the emerging algebraic techniques and the more traditional geometric mode of thought. Both men were among the first professional mathematicians in England. Wallis studied at Cambridge, deciphered Royalist codes for Parliament during the Civil War, and was one of the secretaries to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster. He was rewarded for his support of Parliament with the Savilian Professorship of Geometry at Oxford. Barrow was also a student at Cambridge and, in 1660, was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College. He subsequently became Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, before finally becoming the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The work of both Wallis and Barrow was at the forefront of English mathematics in the second half of the seventeenth century. But even though both enjoyed very similar educations and careers, their mathematical techniques were quite different. Wallis’s style is usually considered algebraic, while Barrow’s is considered geometric. At the same time each man’s work exhibited a similar tension between tradition and innovation - between the mathematical ideas inherited from the Greeks and the demands of the new methods and problems.

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