This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.

Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 integrates social history, politics and literary culture as part of a ground-breaking study that provides revealing insights into early modern English society. Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown examine political scandals and familiar characters-including scolds, cuckolds and witches-to show how their behaviour turned the ordered world around them upside down in very specific, gendered ways. Using case studies from theatre, civic ritual and witchcraft, the book demonstrates how ideas of gendered inversion, failed patriarchs, and disorderly women permeate the mental world of early modern England. Amussen and Underdown show both how these ideas were central to understanding society and politics as well as the ways in which both women and men were disciplined formally and informally for inverting the gender order. In doing so, they give a glimpse of how we can connect different dimensions of early modern society. This is a vital study for anyone interested in understanding the connections between social practice, culture, and politics in 16th- and 17th-century England.

This wide-ranging volume goes to the heart of the revisionist debate about the crisis of government that led to the English Civil War. The author tackles questions about the patronage that structured early modern society, arguing that the increase in royal bounty in the early seventeenth century redefined the corrupt practices that characterized early modern administration.

My dissertation draws on recent methodological and theoretical developments in social history in order to rethink the political significance of formal experimentation in early 17th century English theater. Specifically, I argue that formal experiments in four Jacobean plays should be read as participating in a process whereby early modern rulers and the people they ostensibly commanded negotiated and struggled over the meanings of dominant political discourses and the legitimate uses of governing institutions. Recent social historical work on "popular politics" has drawn attention to the fact that local officials and private citizens both manipulated tropes of authority and obedience and appropriated governing institutions - including the militia, the jury trial and the public execution - in order to meet their own political needs rather than those of the court. By focusing on popular political activity, I reconsider the new historicist claim that, "Power in early modern England was performative," in order to emphasize the participatory, contested nature of performance as a social activity, and the overdetermined, negotiated nature of the period's political hegemony. The plays that I analyze not only include characters and images drawn from popular political life but also actively participate in this negotiation by appropriating dominant governing discourses and institutions for the benefit of the players and playwrights and the entertainment of diverse audiences. In each chapter, I engage in an intertextual analysis that reads a single, experimental play in conversation with different historical texts - including pamphlets, chronicle histories and trial records - that record and respond to the appropriation of authority. The first chapter reads Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster in relation to divine right treatises, political rumors and popular protests. The second chapter reads Shakespeare's Measure for Measure as a manipulation of the dominant legal discourse surrounding justice and mercy. The third chapter places John Webster's The White Devil into conversation with legal rituals like trials and public executions. The final chapter reads Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair alongside various texts describing the demographic changes to the early modern London metropolis and the struggles of the city government to manage these changes.

Criticism and Compliment examines the poems, plays and masques of the three figures who succeeded Ben Jonson as authors of court entertainments in the England of Charles I. The courtly literature of Caroline England has been dismissed by critics and characterised by historians as propaganda for Charles I's absolutism penned by sycophantic hirelings. Kevin Sharpe questions the assumptions on which these evaluations have been based. Challenging the traditional argument for a polarity between court and country cultures in early Stuart England, he re-reads the plays, poems and masques as primary documents of political attitudes articulated at court. Far from being confined to a decade or a party, the courtly literature of the 1630s is relocated within the broader humanist tradition of counsel. Through the language of love - a language, it is argued, that was part of the discourse of politics in Caroline England - the court poets criticised fundamental premises of the King's political ideology, and counselled traditional and moderate modes of government.

Andrew McRae examines the relation between literature and politics at a pivotal moment in English history. He argues that the most influential and incisive political satire in this period may be found in manuscript libels, scurrilous pamphlets and a range of other material written and circulated under the threat of censorship. These are the unauthorised texts of early Stuart England. From his analysis of these texts, McRae argues that satire, as the pre-eminent literary mode of discrimination and stigmatisation, helped people make sense of the confusing political conditions of the early Stuart era. It did so partly through personal attacks and partly also through sophisticated interventions into ongoing political and ideological debates. In such forms satire provided resources through which contemporary writers could define new models of political identity and construct new discourses of dissent. This book wil be of interest to political and literary historians alike.

Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England models and refines the study of these complicated collections. Several of its contributors question and redefine the terms we use to describe miscellanies and anthologies. Two senior scholars correct the misidentification of a scribe and, in so doing, uncover evidence of a Catholic, probably Jesuit, priest and community in a trio of manuscripts. Additional contributors show compilers interpreting, attributing, and arranging texts, as well as passively accepting others’ editorial decisions. While manuscript verse miscellanies remain appropriately central to the collection, several essays also involve print and prose, ranging from letters to sermons and even political prophesies. Using extensive textual and bibliographical evidence, the collection offers stimulating new readings of literature, politics, and religion in the early modern period, and promises to make important interventions in academic studies of the history of the book.

Intended to celebrate the 70th birthday of the distinguished historian, Lawrence Stone, these essays owe much to his influence. There are also four appreciations by friends and colleagues from Oxford and Princeton and a little-known autobiographical piece by Lawrence Stone himself.

Despite the fact that its capital city and over one third of its territory was within the continent of Europe, the Ottoman Empire has consistently been regarded as a place apart, inextricably divided from the West by differences of culture and religion. A perception of its militarism, its barbarism, its tyranny, the sexual appetites of its rulers and its pervasive exoticism has led historians to measure the Ottoman world against a western standard and find it lacking. In recent decades, a dynamic and convincing scholarship has emerged that seeks to comprehend and, in the process, to de-exoticize this enduring realm. Dan Goffman provides a thorough introduction to the history and institutions of the Ottoman Empire from this new standpoint, and presents a claim for its inclusion in Europe. His lucid and engaging book - an important addition to New Approaches to European History - will be essential reading for undergraduates.

Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I of England were two of the most notorious queens in European history. They both faced accusations that they had transgressed social, gender and regional norms, and attempted to defend themselves against negative reactions to their behavior. Each queen engaged with the debates of her time concerning the place of women within their families, religion, politics, the public sphere and court culture and attempted to counter criticism of her foreign origins and political influence. The impeachment of Henrietta Maria in 1643 and trial and execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793 were also trials of monarchical government that shaped the English Civil Wars and French Revolution.