Visions of monarchy and magistracy in women’s political writing, 1640–80

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Capern
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mary Cary

This chapter analyses early-modern English women writers and the number and patterns of their publication of religious and secular texts between 1640 and 1680. The chapter’s focus is on the impact of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Republic on women’s political thought, particularly their ideas about temporal monarchy and the highest magistrate, or God. The women writers featured include the puritan and parliamentarian writers Eleanor Davies, Mary Pope, Katherine Chidley and Mary Cary, and the Catholic, Anglican and royalist writers Helen More, Elizabeth Major, Dorothy Pakington and Rachel Jevon. Quakers examined include Margaret Fell, Dorothy Burch and Priscilla Cotton. Margaret Cavendish’s work is classified as uniquely secular at a time when women’s political thinking was almost entirely shaped by religion.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
pp. 229-244
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
The Individual

This piece discusses the individual and collective contribution of the essays in the volume to debates framed by modern scholars on the English Reformation and its impact, a field dominated by Sir Geoffrey Elton and Patrick Collinson; on the origins of the English Civil War, established by the work of Conrad Russell; and on the connections drawn between historiography and political thought or political thinking, a world dominated by J. G. A. Pocock and more recently by the series of studies prompted by the seminal work of Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton and Blair Worden.

English Baptists and the Struggle for Theological Authority, 1642–1646

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 546-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW C. BINGHAM
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Theological Authority ◽  
Innovative Techniques ◽  
Westminster Assembly

This article explores interactions between Baptist lay theologians and ordained clergy during the first English civil war. Despite their marginalised position outside the national Church, Baptists employed a variety of innovative techniques to coerce ordained ministers into debates which the latter would have preferred to avoid. Though Baptists during the period did not achieve intellectual parity with the members of the Westminster Assembly and others whom they sought to influence, their efforts contributed to an ongoing transition within the early modern English Atlantic whereby religious culture was made more participatory and theological authority democratised.

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.

Friendship, temperance and the probable: Erasmus, sermo rhetoric, and the early modern English civic state

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Civic Agency ◽  
Rhetorical Structures ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Training

The essay explores Erasmus' development of a fourth category of rhetoric, the familiar, in its work as a rhetoric of the absent audience in both personal and sociopolitical contexts, and as a rhetoric resonant with early modern theories of friendship and temperance. The discussion is set against a background of Caxton's printing of the translation of Cicero's De Amicitia, because Erasmus casts friendship as the context for appropriate communication between people from quite different education and training, along with the probable rhetoric that enables appropriate persuasion. The probable rhetorical stance of temperate friendship proposes a foundation for a common weal1 based on a co-extensive sense of selfhood. This focus suggests that the familiar rhetoric set out in Erasmus' De Conscribendis epistolis draws on Cicero's rhetoric of sermo2 at the heart of friendship.3 It explores the effects of the rhetorical stance of probable rhetoric, both for personal and social writing, and for political action, and looks at the impact of sermo rhetoric on ideas of identity and civic politics in an age of burgeoning circulation of books (both script and print). The essay concludes with three post-Erasmian case studies in English rhetoric [Elyot, Wilson, Lever] that use probable rhetoric to document approaches to individual and civic agency and which offer insights into the Western neoliberal state rhetorical structures of today.

All the king's men: the impact of the crown's Irish soldiers on the English civil war

1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (83) ◽  
pp. 239-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce Lee Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Military Assistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Disastrous Effect ◽  
Second Year ◽  
King's Men ◽  
The Impact

In the second year of the English civil war both king and parliament sought and received substantial military assistance from outside the kingdom: Charles concluded a truce with the Irish rebels and began the importation of troops from Ireland; parliament negotiated the introduction of an army from Scotland. Historians of the period are agreed that these parallel steps had quite opposite results. While the Scots army is invariably viewed as a ‘big factor in turning the scales against the king’, Charles's importation of Irish soldiers is regarded as having an insignificant impact on his military situation and a disastrous effect upon his popular standing. Parliament's alliance with the Scots has therefore been acclaimed necessary and prudent, Charles's acquisition of Irish help a terrible blunder. Samuel R. Gardiner, in his classic history of the English civil war, singled out the king's importation of Irish troops to England as the act which did most to weaken his authority.

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