Download or read book Agnes Bowker s Cat written by David Cressy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-11-19 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What a world is this? It is marvelous, it is monstrous! I hear say there is a young woman, born in the town of Harborough, one Bowker, a butcher's daughter, which of late, God wot, is bought to bed of a cat, or have delivered a cat, or, if you will, is the mother of a cat! Oh God!" William Bullein - Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1578) David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings-bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism-disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.
Download or read book Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England written by David Cressy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Travesties and Transgressions, David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. He uses a series of linked stories and close readings of local texts and narratives to investigate unorthodox happenings such as bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, excommunication and irregular burial, nakedness and cross-dressing. Each story, and the reaction it generated, exposes the strains and stresses of its local time and circumstances. The reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles I were witness to endless religious disputes, tussles for power within the aristocracy, and arguments galore about the behaviour and beliefs of common people. Questions raised by 'unnatural' episodes were debated throughout society at local and national levels, and engaged the attention of the magistrates, the bishops, the crown, and the court. The resolution of such questions was not taken lightly in a world in which God and the devil still fought for people's souls.
Download or read book Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England written by David Cressy and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Cressy examines how the orderly Protestant and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm.
Download or read book Agnes Bowker s Cat written by David Cressy and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2001-05-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings--bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism--disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.
Download or read book Staged Transgression in Shakespeare s England written by R. Loughnane and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-03 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England is a groundbreaking collection of seventeen essays, drawing together leading and emerging scholars to discuss and challenge critical assumptions about the transgressive nature of the early modern English stage. These essays shed new light on issues of gender, race, sexuality, law and politics. Staged Transgression was followed by a companion collection, Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England (2019), also available from Palgrave: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-00892-5
Download or read book Witchcraft the Devil and Emotions in Early Modern England written by Charlotte-Rose Millar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.
Download or read book Brokerage and Networks in London s Global World written by David Farr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Londoner John Blackwell (1624-1701), shaped by his parents’ Puritanism and merchant interests of his iconoclast father, became one of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army captains. Working with his father in Parliament’s financial administration both supported the regicide and benefitted financially from the subsequent sales of land from those defeated in the civil wars. Surviving the Restoration, Blackwell pursued interests in Ireland and banking schemes in London and Massachusetts, before being governor of Pennsylvania. Blackwell worked with his son, Lambert Blackwell, who established himself as a merchant, financier and representative of the state in Italy during the wars of William III before being embroiled in the South Sea Bubble. The linked histories of the three Blackwells reinforce the importance of kinship and the development of the early modern state centred in an increasingly global London and illustrate the ownership of the memory of the civil wars, facilitated by their kin links to Cromwell and John Lambert, architect of Cromwell’s Protectorate, by those who fought against Charles I. Suitable for specialists in the area and students taking courses on early modern English, European and American history as well as those with a more general interest in the period.
Download or read book England s Islands in a Sea of Troubles written by David Cressy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent. England's islands were difficult to govern, and were prone to neglect, yet their strategic value far outweighed their size. Though vulnerable to foreign threats, their harbours and castles served as forward bases of English power. In civil war they were divided and contested, fought over and occupied. Jersey and the Isles of Scilly served as refuges for royalists on the run. Charles I was held on the Isle of Wight. External authority was sometimes light of touch, as English governments used the islands as fortresses, commercial assets, and political prisons. London was often puzzled by the linguistic differences, tangled histories, and special claims of island communities. Though increasingly integrated within the realm, the islands maintained challenging peculiarities and distinctive characteristics. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and the insights of maritime, military, and legal scholarship, this is an original contribution to social, cultural, and constitutional history.
Download or read book God s Fury England s Fire written by Michael Braddick and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was the single most traumatic event in this country between the medieval Black Death and the two world wars. Indeed, it is likely that a greater percentage of the population were killed in the civil wars than in the First World War. This sense of overwhelming trauma gives this major new history its title: God’s Fury, England’s Fire. The name of a pamphlet written after the king’s surrender, it sums up the widespread feeling within England that the seemingly endless nightmare that had destroyed families, towns and livelihoods was ordained by a vengeful God – that the people of England had sinned and were now being punished. As with all civil wars, however, ‘God’s fury’ could support or destroy either side in the conflict. Was God angry at Charles I for failing to support the true, protestant, religion and refusing to work with Parliament? Or was God angry with those who had dared challenge His anointed Sovereign? Michael Braddick’s remarkable book gives the reader a vivid and enduring sense both of what it was like to live through events of uncontrollable violence and what really animated the different sides. The killing of Charles I and the declaration of a republic – events which even now seem in an English context utterly astounding – were by no means the only outcomes, and Braddick brilliantly describes the twists and turns that led to the most radical solutions of all to the country’s political implosion. He also describes very effectively the influence of events in Scotland, Ireland and the European mainland on the conflict in England. God’s Fury, England’s Fire allows readers to understand once more the events that have so fundamentally marked this country and which still resonate centuries after their bloody ending.
Download or read book Lying in Early Modern English Culture written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.
Download or read book Stuart Style written by Maria Hayward and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centering on five Stuart rulers, plus their royal courtiers and tailors, this is the first detailed study of elite men's clothing in 17th-century Scotland.
Download or read book The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature written by Sophie Chiari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its many rites of initiation (religious, educational, professional or sexual), Elizabethan and Jacobean education emphasized both imitation and discovery in a struggle to bring population to a minimal literacy, while more demanding techniques were being developed for the cultural elite. The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature examines the question of transmission and of the educational procedures in16th- and 17th-century England by emphasizing deviant practices that questioned, reassessed or even challenged pre-established cultural norms and traditions. This volume thus alternates theoretical analyses with more specific readings in order to investigate the multiple ways in which ideas then circulated. It also addresses the ways in which the dominant cultural forms of the literature and drama of Shakespeare’s age were being subverted. In this regard, its various contributors analyze how the interrelated processes of initiation, transmission and transgression operated at the core of early modern English culture, and how Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, or lesser known poets and playwrights such as Thomas Howell, Thomas Edwards and George Villiers, managed to appropriate these cultural processes in their works.
Download or read book The Post Reformation written by John Spurr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 17th century was a dynamic period characterized by huge political and social changes, including the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth and the Restoration. The Britain of 1714 was recognizably more modern than it was in 1603. At the heart of these changes was religion and the search for an acceptable religious settlement, which stimulated the Pilgrim Fathers to leave to settle America, the Popish plot and the Glorious Revolution in which James II was kicked off the throne. This book looks at both the private aspects of human beliefs and practices and also institutional religion, investigating the growing competition between rival versions of Christianity and the growing expectation that individuals should be allowed to worship as they saw fit.
Download or read book Identity and Agency in England 1500 1800 written by J. Barry and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is arranged around the central issue raised by a raft of new empirical research - the relationship between social identity, or the 'vision of the self', and the ways in which this can explain historical agency. If identities in early modern society were multiple, complex, and dependent on context, rather than homogenous, consistent, or easily determined, then it is difficult to make simple causal links to behaviour. This collection aims to make innovative new research on the structures of English society available to the wider scholarly audience. The essays use a number of detailed contextual case studies to explore the twin themes of the nature of identities in early modern society, and their role in influencing historical agency. They examine the variety of identities available to individuals in early modern England, and the ways in which these were invoked and employed.
Download or read book Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth Century England written by Randy Robertson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.
Download or read book Bodies Speech and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England written by Sara D. Luttfring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.
Download or read book Dangerous Talk written by David Cressy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dangerous Talk traces free speech across five centuries of popular political culture, and shows how scandalous, seditious and treasonable talk finally gained protection as 'the birthright of an Englishman'.
