scholarly journals Conjuring legitimacy: Shakespeare’s Macbeth as contemporary English politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-405
Author(s):  
Edvard Djordjevic
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Failed Attempt ◽  
The Witch ◽  
English Politics ◽  
Witch Hunts

The text provides a political reading of Shakespeare?s Macbeth, claiming that the play is responding to the curious connection between witchcraft and state power in the preceding century, as well as contemporary political events. Namely, practices variously labeled as witchcraft, magic, conjuring were an integral aspect of English politics and struggles over royal succession in the sixteenth century; even more so were the witch hunts and attempts by British monarchs to control witchcraft. These issues reached a head with the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, and the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. On the surface, Shakespeare?s play, written in the immediate aftermath of the failed attempt at regicide, brings these historical and political issues together in an effort to legitimize James? rule. However, the article shows that a closer look reveals a more complicated, indeed subversive undercurrent at play. Paradoxically, while Macbeth does provide James with legitimacy, at the same time it calls into question the grounds of that legitimacy.

The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien*

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Classical World ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This study seeks to demonstrate that the timing, subject, and audience for the art of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien all argue against the view that the witches in their prints and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or malevolent treatises such as theMalleus maleficiarum. The witch craze did not gain momentum until late in the sixteenth century while the witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien belong to an earlier era. They are more plausible as a response to humanist interest in the poetry and satire of the classical world, and are better understood as poetic constructions created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience.

A Literary Link between Thomas Shadwell and Christian Felix Weisse

PMLA ◽  
1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 808-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sort It ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
The Witch

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

Het publiek in de tribune : vormen van politieke informatie

Res Publica ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
Guido Dierickx
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Discriminating Power ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Rules Of The Game

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer».  From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations.  The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, local politics social problems, political issues ?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the (relevant) dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations.

Participation, Civil Society and the Facebook Use of NGOs in Turkey

2017 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Kamil Demirhan
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Emergency Education ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Political Events

This study finds out the use of Facebook by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Turkey to engage the social and political events of the country. NGOs are civil society organizations aiming at promoting participation of citizens in social and political issues. They are a part of democratic system and they have important role to struggle with corruptions and improve the legitimacy of political-legal organization in political system. NGOs work using social networks and promoting civic culture. Therefore, the use of new communication and interaction channels is necessary for NGOs to develop social networks and civic participation. Social media can be a new channel to promote social and political life. This study focuses on Facebook activities of 40 NGOs selected from eight different activity fields: politics, environment, woman rights, economy, emergency, education, human rights, and democracy. It uses content analysis method to understand the NGOs' activities in Facebook, in terms of social and political issues realized in the year of 2012.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

The Limits of Deference: Agricultural Communities in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Election Campaign

1981 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.R. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Agricultural Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legislative Changes ◽  
English Politics ◽  
Action Groups

The concept of the deferential society appears superficially to provide a valuable sociological underpinning to the phenomenon of the continuing dominance of the landed classes in nineteenth-century English politics. According to Professor D.C. Moore, whose case is advanced most fully in The Politics of Deference (1976), rural society consisted largely of a network of hierarchically structured communities. These, “what might be called ‘deference communities’ or ‘deference networks,’ (were) the essential action groups of mid-nineteenth century English politics.” Their nature and interaction “helps to explain the perpetuation of this structure (the deferential society), the perpetuation of the related political system, and the peculiar selection and formulation of political issues within the system.” It is difficult to do Professor Moore's subtle reasoning justice in a limited space but it would probably be fair to say that he sees most of the major legislative changes of the mid-nineteenth century as shaped and conditioned by the response of deferential leaders to social and economic change, a response which was designed as much to protect and buttress the existing system as to accommodate the new disruptive forces by major concession.Professor Moore's case depends to a considerable extent on the pervasiveness and dominance of his “deferential communities” in rural society. However, while their existence is undeniable, other historians have expressed reservations as to the emphasis put on their role. Put most simply, in the words of Professor Moore's severest critic, “the electoral history of nineteenth-century Britain cannot be deduced from Bateman's Great Landowners.”

scholarly journals The Literary Heritage of Jesuits of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-440
Author(s):  
Barbara Milewska-Waźbińska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Considerable Effect ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Vita Activa

Since 1565, the Society of Jesus promoted education in the humanities. The vast majority of the Polish nobility received their education in Jesuit colleges. Jesuit preachers, writers, poets, authors of heraldic and emblem works—derived mostly from the nobility—were understandably deeply involved in politics. The legacy of the most outstanding Jesuit authors testifies to their active participation in public life. In keeping with the specifics of the Polish case, their literary production emphasizes not only the vita activa, but also animus civilis. Political and historical themes, as well as religious motifs, played a significant role in Jesuit works. The Society’s activities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth produced important works in various genres of literature, a significant portion of which was in Latin. Their poetry and prose is characterized by involvement in socio-political issues: the stormy political events and wars of the seventeenth century had a considerable effect on the compositions of the leading Jesuit authors.

Reformation without end

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

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