Todd Butler charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined and effected political action. He draws upon a myriad of literary and political texts, including the work of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, and John Milton.

Drawing upon a myriad of literary and political texts, Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance--the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one's civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament--evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects alike imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, Todd Butler here investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the various ways that early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this continuing immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, Butler examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth-century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with similarly close readings of religious and political affairs that similarly return our attention to how early Stuart writers of all sorts understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, oaths, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how--or even if--one can freely think.

Todd Butler charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined and effected political action. He draws upon a myriad of literary and political texts, including the work of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, and John Milton.

Kevin Sharpe reassesses the role that ideology, rhetoric and intellectual discussion played in the upheavals of seventeenth-century England.

This volume of essays explores the rise of parliament in the historical imagination of early modern England. The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes in early modern England - most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped the period's political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, shaping the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies. Since J. G. A. Pocock's brilliant The ancient constitution and the feudal law (1957), scholars have recognised that conceptions about the antiquity of England's parliamentary constitution - particularly its basis in common law - were a defining element of early Stuart political mentalities and ideological debates. The purpose of this volume is to explore the range of contemporary views of parliament's history and to trace their growing definition and prominence over the Tudor and early Stuart period. Historical culture is defined widely to include chronicles, more overtly 'literary' texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition. The volume restates the crucial role of institutions for understanding the political culture and thought of the early modern period. It will be of interest to students and scholars of the political, religious and intellectual history and literature of the early modern English-speaking world and Europe.

This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors demonstrate how the site, as well as the people and trades occupying the precinct, can be positioned within wider fields of representations, practices, and social networks. A focus on St Paul’s is therefore about more than just the specific site on Ludgate Hill: it is about those practices and representations connected to it, which either extended beyond or originated in places other than the Cathedral environs. This points to the range of localised, regional, national, and transnational relationships in which the precinct and its people were situated and to which they contributed.

This book provides diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices.

In recent years new schools of historiography and criticism have recast the political and cultural histories of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. However, for all the benefits of their insights, most revisionist historians have too narrowly focussed on high politics to the neglect of values and ideology, and New Historicist literary scholars have displayed an insufficient grasp of chronology and historical context. The contributors to this pioneering volume, richly fusing these approaches, apply a revisionist close attention to moments to the wide range of texts - verbal and visual - that critics have begun to read as representations of power and politics. Excitingly broadening the range of areas and evidence for the study of politics, these outstanding essays demonstrate how the study of high culture - classical translations, court portraits royal palaces, the conduct of chivalric ceremony - and low culture - cheap pamphlets and scurrilous verses - enable us to reconstruct the languages through which contemporaries interpreted their political environment. The volume posits a reconsideration of the traditional antithetical concepts - court and country, verbal and visual, critical and complimentary, elite and popular; examines the constructions of a moral and social order enacted in a wide variety of cultural practices; and demonstrates how common vocabularies could in changed circumstances be combined and deployed to sustain quite different ideological positions. This book opens a new agenda for the study of the politics of culture and the culture of politics in early modern England. -- Publisher's website.

New essays focussing on the problems of politics, women, and print culture in seventeenth-century Britain. This collection of essays, presented as a tribute to the career of Lois Green Schowerer, the highly-esteemed scholar of early modern British history, explores the several topics which have been central to her interests: politics, political thought, and the role of women in later Stuart Britain. Through two related sections, on the politics of violence and revolutions, and on the play of political imagination, American and British scholars address ProfessorSchowerer's pioneering brief for the role of radicalism in the three decades spanning the Restoriation and the Revolution: Professor Schwoerer offers her own view and summary of that "wicked and turbulent" era in response. Throughout, the articles are ultimately concerned with the underlying issue of sovereignty, coming to terms with the contradictions and continuing tensions between a desire for monarchichal stability and the fear of an emerging absolutism an issue not unique to the Restoration era. Whether looking back to the early career of Thomas Hobbes, the antecedents of patriarchalism and ancient constitutionalism, or the trial and execution of Charles I, they see the Restoration and Revolution in the broader context of the whole seventeenth century. Professor HOWARD NENNER teaches in the Department of History, Smith College. Contributors: Mark Goldie, Janelle Greenberg, Tim Harris, Howard Nenner, Linda Levy Peck, J.G.A. Pocock, Gordon Schochet, Hilda L. Smith, Steven Zwicker, Melinda Zook, Lois Green Schwoerer.