Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records

An extraordinary court with late medieval roots in the activities of the king’s council, Star Chamber came into its own over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before being abolished in 1641 by members of parliament for what they deemed egregious abuses of royal power. Before its demise, the court heard a wide range of disputes in cases framed as fraud, libel, riot, and more. In so doing, it produced records of a sort that make its archive invaluable to many researchers today for insights into both the ordinary and extraordinary. The chapters gathered here explore what we can learn about the history of an age through both the practices of its courts and the disputes of the people who came before them. With Star Chamber, we view a court that came of age in an era of social, legal, religious, and political transformation, and one that left an exceptional wealth of documentation that will repay further study.

Law, Status, and the Lash: Judicial Whipping in Early Modern England

This article focuses on the contested development of judicial whipping as a marker and maker of status in the particular social, cultural, and political context of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these years people disputed with special vigor who could be whipped and why, often in battles fought in and around parliaments and the Court of Star Chamber, and often invoking fears of “servility.” Tracing the rise and spread of judicial whipping, its linking with the poor, and disputes over its use, this article demonstrates how whipping served as a distinctively and explicitly status-based disciplinary tool, embedding hierarchical values in the law not just in practice but also in prescript. Some authorities thought the whip appropriate only for the “servile” and, indeed, both valuable and dangerous for its ability to inculcate a “slavish disposition.” After men of the gentry successfully asserted their freedom from the lash, so too did a somewhat expanded group of “free” and “sufficient” men. By the later seventeenth century, challenges over the uses of judicial whipping left it limited ever more firmly to people of low status, affixed by law to offenses typically associated with the insubordinate poor.

Milton Among the Iconoclasts

This chapter seeks to focus on an aspect of Milton’s alleged Puritan persona, namely his iconoclasm. Since E. B. Gilman’s subtly nuanced Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (1986), it has become fashionable to discuss Milton the iconoclastic polemicist or to debate the extent of his iconoclastic poetic strategies. All too often this criticism rehearses the old Puritan / Laudian binary and assumes that Milton the Puritan is intrinsically iconoclastic. Yet, as the notorious 1632 Star Chamber trial of Henry Sherfield demonstrates, Calvinist iconoclasm was but the most extreme end of a rich spectrum of Protestant attitudes to images in seventeenth-century England. By reading Milton’s embodied representation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Paradise Lost in the context of the Sherfield trial, I hope to make the case for a more iconophile poet, thus rescuing Milton from the refashioning conducted by later writers and critics.

Shows of Joy and Malice

The spread of the plague in Norwich in July 1603 disrupted the city’s celebrations of the coronation of King James I, and precipitated a conflict between the city’s mayor, Thomas Lane, and the alderman Robert Gibson, which culminated in Gibson taking Lane to the Star Chamber. Drawing on previously unexamined legal and civic documents, this essay reconstructs both Norwich’s planned and actual coronation festivities and their role in the dispute in July, including its longer legal aftermath in court. The essay examines the meanings and functions participants attributed to the celebrations in Norwich, and to what extent they can be understood as performances, and, if so, of what.

Performing Early Modern Libel

This essay focuses on provincial libel cases between private individuals tried at the court of Star Chamber during the early seventeenth century. Libelling saw personal scandals creatively couched in verses, visual symbols, or mock-ceremonies, and read, sung, and posted in early modern communities. This essay identifies a range of ‘manners’ of libel, and compares a libellous ‘Stage plaie’ to a set of libellous mock-proclamations and a ‘book’ of playing card knaves. The essay argues that libels should be understood as functioning on a spectrum of performance. They should therefore prompt an expansion of the boundaries of early performance.