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"Elizabethan Stuart"
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The betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots : Elizabeth I and her greatest rival
A history of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, two women struggling for supremacy in a man's world, describes how their bonds of friendship sustained them until jealousy and antipathy turned them into enemies.
Book
Alchemical belief : occultism in the religious culture of early modern England
What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national—and in some cases royalist—loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England's church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.
eBook
Maritime Networks: Priests, Mariners, and Their Landing Places in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England
This article seeks to present post-Reformation priestly missions in England as a practice rooted in a maritime structure of seaports, sea routes, and mariners. While historiography has traced the networks that brought priests to England in the second half of the sixteenth century, it has not focused exclusively on their maritime dimension. As a result, the role of sea conveyors in assisting travelling priests has been largely overlooked, leaving an incomplete picture. By examining landing sites, methods of conveyance, and the mariners involved, this article aims to address that gap. It also offers additional analysis to support the conclusions of scholars such as John Bossy, Alan Dures, and Michael Williams.
Journal Article
Moral marketplaces: regulating the food markets of late Elizabethan and early Stuart London
This article examines the economic culture of urban food markets in early modern England. It focuses on London between 1590 and 1640 to argue that market regulation, even in fast-growing, commercializing cities, was underpinned by moralized values. It also assesses a largely untapped citywide book of fines, containing payments for regulatory offences. The first section outlines London's market system and regulation, the second looks at enforcement in practice and the third discusses the underlying values. This contributes to our understanding of day-to-day food marketing and proposes that studies of ‘moral economy’ should examine everyday commerce and major cities.
Journal Article
Arrest for Debt in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London
Arrest on civil process, especially for debt, became an increasingly important motif in late Elizabethan and early Stuart literature, especially Jacobean drama. In the second half of the sixteenth century, rates of litigation skyrocketed, arrest on first instance became common, and a series of bankruptcy acts exacerbated the inequities of debt proceedings. Moreover, the crown's efforts to mitigate problems of imprisonment for debt made arrest a flashpoint between competing movements for legal reform. In these contexts, dramatists paid new attention to arrest practices, regularly representing them as illegitimate and open to abuse. The motif of arrest for debt had particular power in dramatic works because the legal act itself was inherently performative.
Journal Article
Take measure of your wide and flaunting garments
Farthingales were large stiffened structures placed beneath a woman’s skirts in order to push them out and enlarge the lower half of the body. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England criticisms of these garments increasingly focused on their spatial ramifications, decrying their monstrous size and inconvenience. Nonetheless farthingales served important social and cultural functions for women in early modern England, shaping and defining status and wealth in both court and urban spaces. Using surviving textual and visual sources, as well as engaging with the process of historical dress reconstruction, this article argues that spatial anxieties relating to farthingales were less about the actual size of this garment and more related to older fears concerning the ability of farthingales to create intimate personal spaces around the female body, mask the appropriation of social status, and physically displace men. In turn, these anxieties led to the establishment of a common and enduring trope regarding the monstrous size of these garments as women in farthingales were perceived to be challenging their social and gendered place in the world.
Journal Article
Quarantining Contagion
Despite repeated outbreaks of plague in the centuries following the Black Death, no consensus existed in England on the issues of how plague should be fought, how the infected should be cared for, and how the implementation of such measures would be funded. An abundance of printed texts emerged during the sixteenth century offering English readers information on what could and should be done to contain plague’s spread. Ultimately their authors explained plague providentially, with many going so far as to claim that plague was entirely beyond the control of human actions. Placing the Tudor and Stuart Crowns’ evolving quarantine policy into dialogue with the voices of clerics, physicians, philosophers, and poets who engaged with royal policy and at times offered substantial criticisms of it, this essay argues that the national imposition of quarantine provoked royal subjects to articulate and defend their own opinions about the practice, encouraging the development of popular political dialogue.
Journal Article
Theatricalising the Theology of Patient Revenge in English Renaissance Drama
Parmi les tropes les plus communs de la tragédie anglaise de la Renaissance, on trouve l’idée de l’impossibilité pour le héros souffrant d’appliquer à sa situation la notion chrétienne de patience. La « patience » en tant que vertu chrétienne résiste à la représentation dans le contexte du théâtre commercial et profane. En dépit de cette difficulté, on rencontre de nombreux exemples dans le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen qui tendent à donner une forme dramatique aux diverses conceptualisations théologiques de la patience chrétienne et aux expériences dévotionnelles qui en découlent. À l’aide de Hamlet et King Lear de Shakespeare, on verra que la difficulté qui consiste à appliquer la vertu de la patience à la passivité dramatique sert dans ces pièces à mettre en mouvement des moments dramatiques éthiques qui compliquent des procédés comme le délai, la durée, l’évitement et la mise en abyme. Un détour par The Spanish Tragedy de Thomas Kyd permet de clarifier ce point dans le contexte de l’émergence de la tragédie de vengeance et de son éthique de la patience dans la vengeance, sur la scène élisabéthaine commerciale. A common trope in much English Renaissance tragedy is the idea of the suffering hero’s inability to apply the Christian notion of patient suffering to his or her predicament. “Patience,” as a Christian virtue, is difficult to represent dramatically in the context of secular, commercial drama. However, despite this difficulty, we encounter many moments in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama where there is an attempt to apply various theological conceptualisations of Christian patience and their attendant devotional experiences to dramatic form. As this essay will argue, with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear in mind, the difficulty in applying the virtue of patience to dramatic passivity serves in these plays to generate ethical dramatic moments which complicate such dramatic devices as delay, duration, deflection, and mirroring. Moreover, such moments can be further clarified with reference to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and the emergence of revenge drama and its ethics of patient revenge on the commercial Elizabethan stage.
Journal Article
Political Christianity in Renaissance Drama
Examining the following selected Renaissance dramas: Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1585), Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596), Massinger’s The Renegado (1624), Daborne’s A Christian Turn'd Turk (1612), and Goffe’s The Raging Turk (1656), this research investigates Renaissance dramatists' portrayal of biased Christian standpoints that govern the relation with the non-Christian to uncover whether that dramatization represents the playwrights' participation in validating those attitudes or their critique of politicizing the Christian faith, in both ways underscoring the existence of an ideological 'political faith' issue. It turns out that the period's plays may reveal that such stereotypes are only recruited to further and validate financial gain, political dominance and racial discrimination; that is, political Christianity. However, the playwrights' attitudes remain subject to their unrevealed intentions, and it is, therefore, left to the reader/audience to take sides. Tactically, the dramatists emerge ahead of the Christian and secular politicians of their time as they assume the safe side of impartiality.
Journal Article