Exploring early modern concepts of honour, this book brings a cultural perspective to our understanding of English imperialism in Ireland.

This study explores pre- and extra-marital relationships among the gentry and nobility of the north of England from 1450 to 1640: the keeping of mistresses, the taking of lovers, the birth of illegitimate children and the fate of those children. It challenges assumptions about the extent to which such activities declined in the period, and hence about the impact of Protestantism and other changes to the culture of the elite. A major contribution to the literature on marriage and sexual relationships, family, kinship and gender, it is aimed at an academic readership in the fields of social and political history.

Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare examines the problems that beset the Tudor administration of Ireland through a range of selected 16th century English narratives. This book is primarily concerned with the period between 1541 and 1603. This bracket provides a framework that charts early modern Irish history from the constitutional change of the island from lordship to kingdom to the end of the conquest in 1603. The mounting impetus to bring Ireland to a "complete" conquest during these years has, quite naturally, led critics to associate England’s reform strategies with Irish Otherness. The preoccupation with this discourse of difference is also perceived as the "Irish Problem," a blanket term broadly used to describe just about every aspect of Irishness incompatible with the English imperialist ideologies. The term stresses everything that is "wrong" with the Irish nation—Ireland was a problem to be resolved. This book takes a different approach towards the "Irish Problem." Instead of rehashing the English government’s complaints of the recalcitrant Irish and the long struggle to impose royal authority in Ireland, I posit that the "Irish Problem" was very much shaped and developed by a larger "English Problem," namely English dissent within the English government. The discussions in this book focuse on the ways in which English writers articulated their knowledge and anxieties of the "English Problem" in sixteenth-century literary and historical narratives. This book reappraises the limitations of the "Irish Problem," and argues that the crown’s failure to control dissent within its own ranks was as detrimental to the conquest as the "Irish Problem," if not more so, and finally, it attempts to demonstrate how dissent translate into governance and conquest in early modern Ireland.

The 1590s have long been considered as having had a distinct character, separate from the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. This book provides a reassessment of the politics and political culture of this significant period.

Courtney Thomas offers an intriguing investigation of honour's social meanings amongst early modern elites in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Through stories of lustful and incestuous rulers, of republican revolution and of unnatural crimes against family, seventeenth-century Englishmen imagined the problem of tyranny through the prism of classical history. This fuelled debates over the practices of their own kings, the necessity of revolution, and the character of English republican thought. The Rule of Manhood explores the dynamic and complex languages of tyranny and masculinity that arose through these classical stories and their imaginative appropriation. Discerning the neglected connection between concepts of power and masculinity in early Stuart England, Jamie A. Gianoutsos shows both how stories of ancient tyranny were deployed in the dialogue around monarchy and rule between 1603 and 1660 and the extent to which these shaped English classical republican thought. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary printed texts, Gianoutsos persuasively weaves together the histories of politics and manhood to make a bold claim: that the fundamental purpose of English republicanism was not liberty or virtue, but the realisation of manhood for its citizens.

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives offers fresh approaches and case studies that push the field of early modern Ireland, and of British and European history more generally, into unexplored directions. The centuries between 1500 and 1700 were pivotal in Ireland’s history, yet so much about this period has remained neglected until relatively recently, and a great deal has yet to be explored. Containing seventeen original and individually commissioned essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging scholars, this book covers a wide range of topics, including social, cultural, and political history as well as folklore, medicine, archaeology, and digital humanities, all of which are enhanced by a selection of maps, graphs, tables, and images. Urging a reevaluation of the terms and assumptions which have been used to describe Ireland’s past, and a consideration of the new directions in which the study of early modern Ireland could be taken, Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives is a groundbreaking collection for students and scholars studying early modern Irish history.

A novel study of the political, religious, and cultural worlds of the principal Irish figures at the exiled court of Charles II

John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text’s political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts, and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.