scholarly journals The third army: wandering soldiers and the negotiation of parliamentary authority, 1642–51

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
David J. Appleby

Historians have long been interested in vagrancy during the early modern period, and the treatment meted out to travellers by local officials. However, despite the fact that so many vagrants were conscripted for military service, little work has been done on how they fared during the British Civil Wars. The closely-related topic of ‘wandering soldiers’ remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that they featured prominently in early modern ‘rogue’ literature. Demobilised veterans and deserters did not simply go home, not least because large numbers of conscripts, being unskilled and unmarried, had little reason to do so. The chapter investigates the scale, complexity and political significance of the problems which resulted, and why, given the fact that such individuals were potentially far more dangerous than normal vagrants, the moral panics of earlier decades were not repeated.

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. KITSON

ABSTRACTThe religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.


Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARASH ABIZADEH

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, religion's freedom from coercion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes's 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique tradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere's religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity—visibility and representativeness—that enabled early modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.


Author(s):  
Jaime Goodrich

Over the course of the early modern period, political and religious upheavals in England led to the formation of many different expatriate communities on the Continent and in North America. As Catholics, Protestants, Nonconformists, and Royalists lived in exile, they established three major sorts of communities: lay congregations; educational institutions; and monastic houses. Examining texts produced by and for representative examples of each group (the Marian congregation at Geneva, the English colleges at Rheims and Rome, and the Third Order Franciscan convent in Brussels), this chapter offers case studies of the way that exiled communities adapted certain forms of writing in order to develop and express a collective religious identity. In doing so, members of these groups negotiated their relationships with one another, the English nation, and the broader Continental religious community.


1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Shapiro

Facts are something we take for granted, at least most of the time. As ordinary individuals we assume that there are knowable facts, for instance, that the dog chewed the drapes, that England exists, that it rained yesterday, or that babies cry. If, as scholars, that is as historians, social scientists, and natural scientists, we are more aware of the problematical nature of “facts” we nevertheless tend to establish and use facts rather unselfconsciously in our work. On this occasion I want to look at the evolution of the concept of “fact,” and in particular the way “fact” entered English natural philosophy. I will attempt to show that the concept of “fact” or “matter of fact,” so prominent in the English empirical tradition, is an adaptation or borrowing from another discipline—jurisprudence, and that many of the assumptions and much of the technology of fact-finding in law were carried over into the experimental science of the seventeenth century.My paper has three parts. The first discusses the nature of legal facts and fact-finding in the early modern period, focusing on the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of law,” the emphasis on first hand testimony by credible witnesses, the preference for direct testimony over inference, and legal efforts to create and maintain impartial proceedings. The second portion attempts to show how legal methods and assumptions were adopted by early modern historiographers and other fact-oriented reporters. The third section attempts to show how the legally constructed concept of “fact” or “matter of fact” was transferred to natural history and natural philosophy and generalized in Locke's empirical philosophy.


Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL JÜTTE

ABSTRACT:City gates and walls were among the most striking features of the pre-modern city, yet we still know relatively little about their impact on daily life and what it meant to enter a city at that time. The present article explores precisely these questions. The first section outlines the general significance of city gates and walls in pre-modern times. In the second, I examine the four distinct functions of city gates in the early modern period. The third and main section presents a detailed description of the various practices, procedures and problems that accompanied the entrance to a city. Finally, and to conclude, the history of city gates is viewed in conjunction with the broader history of the early modern city and its transformation in the transition to modernity.


Author(s):  
Connor Huddlestone

The Tudor privy council was the executive board of the English state and its members the leading political players of the era. Historians of Tudor politics have traditionally focused on kings and great men. When they deal with the privy council, they treat councillors in isolation, only exploring their links with others during moments of political strife. The result is a historiography dominated by faction and division. A prosopographical approach – a form of collective biography that helps identify the shared elements in a group’s experiences, and foregrounds the relations between its members - allows us to look at this group of men as a group, and in so doing to see them differently. Their many shared experiences - a childhood spent together at the same grammar school, a tour of Europe’s universities as young adults, joint military service, marriage into the same family, or time spent together hunting, hawking, and feasting - makes it much harder to divide councillors into neat opposing camps. More broadly, this paper uses the case-study of Tudor privy councillors to illustrate how tools taken from the Digital Humanities can enhance and expand the prosopographical approach: in particular modern relational database software moves us beyond simply identifying common themes in the lives of the members of this group, and allows us to explore patterns of interaction between them. Such an approach, moreover, has the potential to enhance our understanding of many other groups of the early modern period. ​


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
David Porter

This article engages with several recent books about language and literature, with a general focus on the early modern period in Europe. One of these books discusses language study in early modern England. Another examines the histories of words relating to ‘ingenuity’. The third provides a theoretical look at the aphorism with a wide historical scope but with some chapters relating to early modern literature. Each is of general interest for linguistic and literary scholars.


2021 ◽  

The responsibility to protect and intervention possessed a central political importance in the early modern period. This volume asks whether there was also a duty to intervene alongside the right to do so. This draws attention to the relationship between the responsibility to protect, security and reputation, which is the focus of the contributions the book contains. Chronologically, they range from the 15th to the 18th centuries and discuss monarchical duties to protect, alliance commitments, confessional legitimation and motives, as well as those based on patronage, contractual relationships and electoral processes. One of the book’s important findings is a deeper understanding of reputation, which is comprehensively examined here as a political guiding factor with reference to changing understandings of security for the first time.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176
Author(s):  
Olivier Latteur

Even today, the landscape of some Belgian regions is deeply marked by the presence of dozens of Roman barrows. These mounds have survived the passage of time and have shaped the landscape, from antiquity up to the present-day. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period characterized by the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the emergence of antiquarianism, travellers and scholars took a fresh look at these remains. The development of a proto-archaeological approach to the landscape gradually transformed the relationship between man and his surrounds, and contributed to a better understanding of certain landscape features. The first part of this article is devoted to historical observation of these barrows and their impact on the local landscape: Roman tumuli had unusual features (height, strength, presence of trees, etc.) and were used as landmarks and vantage points, especially in the Hesbaye region, which was sparsely wooded and relatively flat. The second part deals with interpretations of these mounds during the early modern period (attribution to the Romans, association with magic, etc.). The third part focuses on the first ‘archaeological’ excavations of tumuli (1507, 1621, 1641, and 1654). These early modern digs gradually transformed perceptions of these remains: observations of a proto-archaeological nature became increasingly common and heralded the emergence of a new approach, which co-existed with medieval or popular traditions.


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