scholarly journals Speaking for the People in Early Modern England*

2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Common People ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Voice

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.

scholarly journals Art. IX.—Observations on the Maráthí Language

1843 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. 84-91
Author(s):  
Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Common People ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Voice

The study of the vernacular languages of India is every day becoming a subject of more and more importance. The Government, yielding to the voice of reason, has decreed, that in every province the language of the people shall be the language of their rulers. Christians and philanthropists, in every district of the country, are preparing books and communicating the elements of learning to the native inhabitants, in their own dialects. Grammars and dictionaries of the principal vernacular tongues, exist either printed or in manuscript; and the speech of the common people instead of being despised as a jargon, is every where cultivated as a language.

“Democratic estate”as the cultural nest of the Early Modern Period. Case of Poland

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-297
Author(s):  
Vasily G. Shchukin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Common People ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
The Common ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
The Village

The article describes the phenomenon of the so-called “democratic estate”, which took on the function of a cultural nest. Democracy, in accordance with Russian tradition, dating back to the discourse of the intelligentsia of the XIX century, is identified with the plebeian, motley origin of the inhabitants of the estate. This problem is considered on the basis of the art culture of Krakow at the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX centuries. In the era of modernism, in the wake of the neo-romantic enthusiasm for the problems of the national spirit and the “organic” life of the common people, in western Galicia, which is one of the provinces of Austria-Hungary, such forms of homestead life appeared that could be called exceptional, unique against the background of other manifestations of the democratization of the estate. Cracow artists and then poets and playwrights, discovering the beauty of the village of Małe Bronowice, located near Cracow, and captivated by folk costumes and the beauty of village girls, married them one by one and moved to village huts, but at the same time transformed the latter into real cultural nests. One of these weddings — the poet Lucian Rydel and the daughter of the village headman Jadwiga Mikołajczyk — inspired the outstanding artist and playwright Stanislav Wyspiańsky to create the most famous national drama of the modernist era — the play “The Wedding” (1901). This work, among other things, depicts the tragedy of mutual misunderstanding of the people and the intelligentsia, which impedes the national revival and, ultimately, the restoration of the country’s independence. The author of the article seeks to prove that the “democratic estate” served not only the necessary simplification of the educated stratum of society, but also the introduction of a high, essentially metropolitan culture into the life and consciousness of the lower strata.

Introduction: State, Republic, and Commonwealth

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Dauber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Penal State ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of

This book examines the tensions between state and society in early modern England (1549–1640) in order to elucidate the reception of the classical commonwealth in the wake of the Reformation. It analyzes five cases: the Reforming Christian commonwealth of the counselors who surrounded Edward VI; the vision of England as a society of orders in Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum; the Aristotelian monarchical republic of John Case's Sphaera Civitatis; the exploration of private and public in Jacobean England, especially in the Aphorisms and Essays of Sir Francis Bacon; and the penal state and the commonwealth of conscience in Thomas Hobbes's Elements of Law. This introduction discusses the history of political thought and the early modern state in England, focusing on commonwealth as a theory of the state.

Translating the Legenda aurea in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Morgan Ring
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Devotional Life ◽  
Legenda Aurea

To its admirers, the Legenda aurea is a powerful expression of medieval belief. To the evangelical pamphleteers of early modern England, it was a symbol of all the failings of unreformed religion. For historians, it is a convenient shorthand for popular hagiography before the Reformation. These readings, however, understate the Legenda's often ambiguous place in early modern devotional life. This article seeks to complicate the Legenda's history in late medieval and early modern England. It argues that the concept and the act of translation rendered Jacobus's text more complex than the historiographical shorthand allows. Translation contributed to the Legenda's power as a devotional work, was a means by which it found its use, impact and wide audience, and was central to how reformers remembered both the text itself and its author. The translated Legenda was not the exception to the narrative of the long Reformation, but an emblem of it.

Demagogues and Demagoguery in Hellenistic Greece

2022 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-76
Author(s):  
Matt Simonton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Common People ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hellenistic Greece ◽  
Political Persecution

Abstract This paper introduces scholars of Greek political thought to the continued existence of the phenomenon of demagoguery, or ‘(mis-)leadership of the people’, in the Hellenistic period. After summarizing Classical elite discourse about demagoguery, I explore three areas in which political leaders continued to run afoul of elite norms in Hellenistic democratic poleis: 1) political persecution of the wealthier members of a political community; 2) ‘pandering to’ the people in a way considered infra dignitatem; and 3) stoking bellicosity among the common people. I show that considerable continuities link the Classical and Hellenistic periods and that demagoguery should be approached as a potential window onto ‘popular culture’ in Greek antiquity.

The Problem of Popular Allegiance in the English Civil War (The Prothero Lecture)

1981 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 69-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Underdown
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Common People ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Looking Back

The belief that the common people of England had little real sympathy for either side in the civil war—that they were mere cannon-fodder, targets for plunder, at best deferential pawns—has a long and respectable ancestry. Many of the combatants believed it, noting the automatic changes of local attitudes when news came of distant vic-tories or defeats. In postwar politics too they knew it was ‘safest to be in favour with the strongest side’. When they fought, it was because they had no alternative. How often, Anthony Ascham lamented, ‘ambitious or angry men forme subtilties and pretences, and afterwards the poore people (who understand them not) are taken out of their houses … to fight and maintaine them at the peril of one anothers lives’. Survival on the margin of subsistence was the universal motive. ‘The people,’ Sir Arthur Haselrig declared, ‘care not what Government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market.’ Looking back after 1660, men as various as Hobbes and Baxter took the same line. ‘There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder,’ Hobbes tells us. Baxter has been as often quoted: ‘The poor plowman understood but little of these Matters; but a little would stir up their Discontent when Money was demanded.’

Rethinking Iconoclasm in Early Modern England: the Case of Cheapside Cross

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 379-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Budd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Complex Variety ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

AbstractProtestant iconoclasm has generally been understood as an assault on the beliefs and practices of traditional religion. This article challenges that understanding through a detailed study of Cheapside Cross, a large monument that was repeatedly attacked by iconoclasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It draws on contemporary pamphlets and the manuscripts records of the City of London to reveal the complex variety of associations that Cheapside Cross acquired before and during the Reformation era. It argues that perceptions of the monument were shaped not only by its iconography but also by its involvement in ceremonies and rituals, including royal coronation processions. The iconoclastic attacks on Cheapside Cross should be interpreted not merely as a challenge to traditional beliefs but as attempts to restructure the monument's associations. The paper concludes that attacks on other images may be understood in a similar manner.

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