Abstract
The culture and the politics of early modern England have both inspired prodigious quantities of scholarship. These subjects have normally been studied separately, however, by experts trained in different disciplines, employing different tools, asking different questions and often taking little notice of each other’s preoccupations. The division partly reflects the specialization that always develops in densely populated fields of research. But it also stems from modern assumptions that the late Renaissance did not entirely share. Since the nineteenth century, Western society has associated culture with leisure, aesthetics and spiritual values, while regarding governance as practical work. Even when culture impinges upon politics, it is viewed as deriving from a different domain. Academic disciplines have reinforced this sense of separation by their distinctive methodologies, professional associations and journals.
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Notes and References
For example, Sharpe and Zwicker (eds), Politics of Discourse; Peck (ed.), Mental World; Sharpe and Lake (eds), Culture and Politics; Smuts (ed.), Stuart Court.
The classic treatment, albeit for the eighteenth century, is Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ in idem., ed., Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975), pp. 17–64,
which should be contrasted with Thomas W. Laquer, ‘Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604–1868’ in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305–56.
See also J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (1986);
Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987) and Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth Century England’ in Sharpe and Lake (eds), Culture and Politics, pp. 257–84.
See Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988);
David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’ in Fletcher and Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder, pp. 116–36 and Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and “Reform of Popular Culture”’, Past and Present, 105 (1984) 79–113.
Cf. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, ch.1, esp. p. 5.
For all these usages see OED. For literature see, in addition, MacLean, Culture and Society, Introduction.
Since words like ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ are anachronistic anyway, I have not tried to define them with any rigour, preferring to let meanings emerge from the context of discussion. In particular, ‘culture’ is deliberately employed in ways that elide the distinction between humanist and anthropological usages, since this has little real meaning in most seventeenth-century contexts.
Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture. A recent work that remains embedded in this tradition is Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (New York and Oxford, 1989).
See esp. Burgess, Ancient Constitution.
E.g. Perry Miller, The New England Mind of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1939);
William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938).
I would not claim that my four categories necessarily form an exhaustive list. A book oriented towards culture at the village level would almost certainly need to add a fifth, involving concepts of patriarchy, family and gender relationships and household management, a topic on which I comment briefly below, pp. 27–8. Readers wishing to explore this subject should begin with Schochet, Patriarchalism; Amussen, Ordered Society; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995);
and David Cressy, Birth, marriage and death: ritual, religion and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997).
A classic exposition is Mervyn James, ‘English politics and the concept of honour, 1485–1640’ in Society, Politics and Culture, pp. 308–416. See also ‘At a crossroads of political culture: the Essex revolt, 1601’, ibid., pp. 416–65.
For discussions see, esp., Amussen, Ordered Society, idem., ‘“The part of a Christian man”: the cultural politics of manhood in early modern England’ in Amussen and Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Ingram, Church Courts.
James, ‘Honour’, esp. pp. 310–12.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 6.3, stanzas 1–2.
See Todd, Humanism, ch. 6.
Peltonen, Classical humanism, pp. 19–53.
A. B. Grossart (ed.), Lord Brooke’s Works (1870; rpt. New York, 1966) IV, pp. 7–8. Cf. Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 24–34.
Cust, ‘Honour, rhetoric and political culture’.
Folger Shakespeare Library Vb 5, pp. 23, 24, passim, a treatise of the 1590s.
D. C. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth (Athens, Georgia, 1985).
For discussion see Flynn, ‘Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave’, pp. 165–6.
James, ‘Honour’, pp. 312–14.
For the importance of the house see Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984) and Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 297–301.
Sidney Lee (ed.), The Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Westport, Connecticut, 1976).
British Library Cotton Mss., Julius CIII, fos. 204, 205.
James, ‘Honour’, pp. 312–14 and passim.
Heal, Hospitality, esp. pp.7 and 10–13.
James, ‘Honour’, pp. 312–13.
Historical Manuscripts Commission Salisbury Manuscripts, XV, p. 26.
James, ‘Honour’, pp. 332–91; cf. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, ch. 5; Frances Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry, the Romance of the Accession Day Tilts’ in her Astraea, pp. 88–111; Ferguson, English Chivalry.
On the latter point see Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order and Ferguson, English Chivalry.
James, ‘Honour’, pp. 328–9; Heal and Holmes, Gentry, p. 7.
The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence Ryan (Ithaca, New York, 1967), e.g. p. 51.
Arlette Jouanna, Le Devoir de Révoke: La noblesse française et la gestation de l’Etat moderne, 1559–1661 (Paris, 1989).
For an overview see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (Cambridge 1988).
Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France 1570–1715 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), ch. 2, surveys this development in France. For French political theory see Jouanna, Devoir de Revolte.
The differences have been rightly stressed by Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (1993), p. 150.
Smuts, ‘Court Centred Politics’, in Sharpe and Lake, Culture and Politics p. 27; Hammer, ‘Uses of Scholarship’.
Yale University Beineke Library Ms. 370, p. 5 from rear, speech of 15 February 1598 recorded in commonplace book of William Camden. This document is discussed and partly reprinted in William Huse Dunham, ‘William Camden’s commonplace book’, The Yale University Library Gazette, 43 (1969).
See Linda Peck, ‘The Mentality of a Jacobean Grandee’ in idem., (ed.), Mental World, pp. 148–68.
McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, pp. 2–3. The treatise survives as Folger Library Mss. Vb. 7, from which we have already quoted several times.
See, in particular, McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia and Rites of Knighthood. Katherine Duncan Jones, Sir Philip Sidney (New Haven, 1991) stresses Sidney’s ambitions and keen sense of family honour.
See, for example, Jones, Sidney.
McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia and Rites of Knighthood.
Ellen Chirelstein, ‘Emblem and Reckless Presence: The Drury Portrait at Yale’ in Gent (ed.), Albion’s Classicism.
William Cornwallis, Essays, p. 41.
Bedford Estates Office mss. vol. 240, 8v, 9, account of the Star Chamber case of Peter Apseley. Bedford marked the quoted passage in the margin.
George Chapman, Bussy DAmbois, II, i, 197–9.
For a suggestive article developing these points see Hibbard, ‘Theatre of dynasty’.
Adamson, ‘Chivalry in Caroline England’ for the first two points; Hibbard, ‘Theatre of dynasty’ for the third.
William Hunt, ‘Spectral origins of the English Revolution: legitimation crisis in early Stuart England’ in Geoff Eley and William Hunt (eds), Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill (1988), pp. 305–32, and below, pp. 62–5.
Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 294; Ferguson, English Chivalry, ch. 5 provides useful historical background.
Marlowe, Edward II, I, iv, 385–400.
On the importance of steadfastness to the pledged word see James, ‘Honour’, p. 316.
Cf. the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar, IV, iii, which also centres on honour and reputation, but is conducted in far more restrained language.
Cust, ‘Honour and Politics’ p. 60.
McCoy, ‘Old English Honour’ in Smuts (ed.) Stuart Court, pp. 146–7; below, pp. 77–8.
Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625 (New Haven and London, 1987), p. 450.
See Brooks, Pettyfoggers.
Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 36.
Burgess, Ancient Constitution and Absolute Monarchy; Christianson, John Selden. For Pocock’s own summary and assessment of the debate through the late 1980s, see the ‘Retrospect’ in the edition cited. An important exception to the consensus is Sommerville, ‘The ancient constitution reassessed’.
See, e.g., J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes from 1550 to 1714 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 219–21.
Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, esp. chs 3–5.
This position is developed throughout Ancient Constitution and is lent further support by Absolute Monarchy.
Burgess, Ancient Constitution, ch. 7.
Ibid., p. 17.
This is especially true of Ancient Constitution; Absolute Monarchy seems more inclined to see the Civil War as the decisive turning point.
Pocock, p. 279.
Prest, pp. 151–3, 221; Brooks, Pettyfoggers, ch. 8.
Heal and Holmes, Gentry, p. 272.
Sommerville, ‘Ancient Constitution Reassessed’, p. 46.
See Ancient Constitution, e.g. pp. 20, 21, 57, 65, 78. Absolute Monarchy ch. 6 provides a more cautious and nuanced treatment.
Cf. Sommerville, ‘Ancient Constitution Reassessed’, p. 47; Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 278.
See The Reverse or Back Face of the English Janus, trans. Redman Wescot (1682), esp. p.a4. The apparent inconsistency may reflect a change of emphasis rather than a real contradiction, since Selden’s earlier position emphasized both change and continuity. For discussions, see Paul Christianson, ‘Young John Selden and the Ancient Constitution’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 128 (1984); id., John Selden, ch. 1.
Past and Present, 72 (1996), pp. 262–304.
Parry, English Antiquarians; Levy, Tudor Historians; Arthur Ferguson, Clio Unbound (Durham, N. C, 1979).
Many of these are discussed below, pp. 41–9.
Alexander Grosart (ed.), Complete Works in Prose and Verse (1896; rpt. New York, 1963), IV, p. 47; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, ch. 2 and passim.
Parry, English Antiquarians, pp. 7–8.
Sommerville, ‘Ancient Constitution Reassessed’, pp. 46–58. Cf. W. O. Hassell (ed.),A catalogue of the library of Sir Edward Coke (New Haven, 1950).
Christianson, John Selden.
See Brooks, Pettyfoggers, from which much of the argument in this paragraph derives.
Ibid., pp. 132–7. I derived the quotation from Folger Shakespeare Library Mss. Vb. 215 (n.p.). For the barristers and Serjeants see Wilfred Prest, The Rise of the Barristers (Oxford, 1996).
The anxiety to establish the common law as an ‘art of well ordering a civil society’ grounded in philosophy is especially clear in Sir Henry Finch, Law, a Discourse Thereof (1627), pp. 1–24.
As Lake has shown for Hooker. See Anglicans and Puritans’?.
Burgess, Ancient Constitution, p. 18.
Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?
Law French was the language in which legal pleadings were conducted before the 1650s — a bastardized French mixed with Latin and English. Hayward, Norman Kings, p. 100.
Of Monarchy, verse 195 (Works I, p. 76).
Alexander Grosart (ed.), Works of Samuel Daniel (1885; rpt. New York, 1963) V, pp. 268, 269. Although Greville and Daniel were not lawyers, their views still provide evidence for views of the law within the culture of the period.
The quotation is from the answer of the judges to a discussion of the status of post nati, quoted in J. Spedding (ed.), Works of Bacon 14 vols, (1858–74; rpt. Stuttgart-Bad, 1962), X, p. 331.
Sir Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Camden Society Publications, 3rd series, 52 (1936), pp. 24–5.
Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood ch. 3.
Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, p. 165.
See Sommerville, ‘Ancient Constitution Reassessed’, pp. 58–64.
For Cotton see Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton (Oxford, 1979) and Parry, English Antiquarians, ch. 3.
E.g. BL Cotton Mss. Julius IV, a volume of precedents on ‘courses used in military affairs’.
J. Spedding (ed.), Works of Bacon, XI, p. 49.
James O. Halliwell (ed.), Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1845) II, pp. 268–9.
Love, Scribal Publication, ch. 1; Woudhuysen, Sidney and manuscripts, ch. 2.
Works, X, pp. 383–4.
Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: a Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985).
Sir William Davies, Ireland, p. 271.
There were two main variants on this theme. One was that William and certain of his successors, like Henry I, had ratified the laws of Edward the Confessor as a way of appeasing the English. The other was John Hayward’s view that William created new laws ‘laid upon the English as fetters about their feet’, which through long usage eventually became ‘not only tolerable, but easy and sweet… by force of long grounded custom’ (Norman Kings, pp. 100, 102). Cf. Christianson’s comments on Selden’s ‘Machiavellian’ view of the Conqueror’s use of law, John Selden, pp. 26–7.
Spedding (ed.), Works of Bacon, XI, p. 90.
‘The Conflicting Loyalties of a “vulger counselor”: The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597–1624’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience: Essays Presented to Gerald Aylmer (Oxford, 1993), pp. 121–50.
Cf. Christianson, John Selden, p. 292.
Library of Congress microfilm 041/camb.793A, p. 711 of mss.
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), esp. pp. 7, 9, 17 and 22.
Works, X, pp. 371–2.
Knafla, Egerton, p. 297.
Ibid., p. 255.
PRO SP16/87 piece 11.
For an example see Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 121–8.
For a superb discussion see C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers.
Sacks, ‘Bristol’s Little Business’.
On this see Herrup, Common Peace.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, IV, ii, 76–82.
Cf. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, ch. 8.
Quoted from Arthur Kinney (ed.), Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I, (Hamden, Connecticut, 1975), p. 60; I have modernized spelling and punctuation.
See Schochet, Patriarchalism. This points out that fully developed patriarchal justifications of royal power were a relatively late phenomenon, although the basis for them had been implicit in Western thought since antiquity. Formal theories of patriarchalism should be distinguished from the more fluid and varied uses to which contemporaries put the metaphor of kings-as-fathers. For an interesting discussion of this latter topic in connection with James I and Lancelot Andrewes see Shuger, Habits of Thought, ch. 6.
Amussen, Ordered Society, passim.
Among many discussions of this by-now familiar point see Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (1979); Wrightson, English Society, ch. 6; Herrup, Common Peace; David Underdown, ‘Taming of the Scold’; and Ingram, Church Courts.
E.g. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922); Hill, Society and Puritanism;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Rise of Magic (1972); Wrightson, English Society, chs 6 and 7.
Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).
The classic exposition is Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).
J. C. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’ in Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1973), pp. 148–201; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics; Robert Iliffe, ‘“Is he like other men?” The Meaning of the Principia Mathematica, and the author as idol’ in McClean (ed.) Stuart Restoration, pp. 159–76.
For an interesting discussion see David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley, 1991), esp. chs 3 and 10.
Smuts, ‘The Court and its Neighborhood’;
Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 403–12.
Works, VI, p. 757.
For this distinction see Collinson, ‘Biblical rhetoric’, p. 19, which argues that apocalyptic thought was less common than analogies to Old Testament prophets.
See especially Christianson, Reformers and Babylon. William Haller, The Elect Nation: the Meaning and Relevance of Foxes Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963), a pioneering essay, is unreliable on some points.
Jesse Lander, ‘“Foxe’s” Books of Martyrs: printing and popularizing the Acts and Monuments’ in Religion and Culture, pp. 69–92.
E.g. Michael Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1969).
For a corrective see Patrick Collinson,Religion of the Protestants (Oxford, 1984), ch. 4.
‘Biblical rhetoric’, esp. pp. 23–36.
For the Tudors see King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, 1989), esp. chs 2 and 3. Stuart religious imagery has not yet received systematic treatment.
Shuger, Habits of Thought, p. 141 and chs 3–7.
The classic early statement is J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’ in Reappraisals in History (New York, 1963), pp. 45–70.
See esp. Caspari, Humanism; Ferguson, Articulate Citizen; James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965); Stone, ‘Educational Revolution’; Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). A good recent study that often follows the trajectory of this earlier scholarship is Todd, Christian Humanism.
David Starkey, ‘England’.
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From humanism to the humanities: education and the liberal arts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe (1986).
O’Day, Education and Society, p. 42.
J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1770 (1987), p. 264.
For surveys see O’Day, Education, ch. 4 and Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966).
Autobiography I, pp. 102–3.
Donna Hamilton, Virgil and the Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus, 1990).
Cf. Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (1990).
Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York, 1992), p. 50.
O’Day, Education, pp. 31–8.
Ibid., p. 105.
Ibid., ch. 6; Holmes and Heal, Gentry, ch. 7; Mark Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1585–1642 (Oxford, 1959);
Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen (1970); Todd, Christian Humanism, ch. 3.
This argument of much of the older secondary literature has been deepened and reinforced by Todd, Christian Humanism.
Logan Pearsall Smith (ed.), Life and Letters of Henry Wotton (Oxford, 1907), II, p. 494,
quoted in Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England’ in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), p. 107.
Jardine and Grafton, ‘Gabriel Harvey’; Jardine and Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers’; Sherman, John Dee: the Politics of Writing and Reading in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995).
Quoted by Vernon Snow, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1960), 372.
Now preserved in the Bedford Estate Office, London.
Library of Congress Microfilms 041/Camb.793A. Under heading 33 the writer refers to an event of 1608 as occurring ‘en ceste année’; several other references to early seventeenth century events suggest a date of composition around this time.
Letters of John Holies, I, p. 55.
Nugae Antiquae, p. 77.
Holinshed, Chronicles, 6 vols (1807–8; rpt. New York, 1965), I, p. 330.
Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, N.C., 1980).
Jardine and Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers’.
Jardine and Grafton, ‘Harvey’.
Francis Bacon, Works IX, p. 17.
Jardine and Sherman, ‘Pragmatic readers’.
Lipsius, Six Books of Politics, pp. 59–60.
Treatments of this tradition include Peter Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge, 1988);
Kelly, Beginning of Ideology, ch. 5; Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 1982);
Richard Schelhase, Tacitus in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1976); and Tuck, Philosophy and Government.
For discussions see Schelhase, Tacitus’, Salmon, ‘Seneca and Tacitus’; Levy, ‘Bacon and the Style of Politics’; idem ‘Hayward, Daniel and Politic History’; and Smuts, ‘Court Centred Politics’.
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, chs 2–3.
E.g. by Peltonen, Republicanism, p. 15.
Ascham, The Schoolmaster, p. 66. On Castiglione and his European influence see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (1995).
John Harington, Nugae antiquae, pp. 112–13.
Well discussed by Todd, Christian Humanism, pp. 27–30 and in ‘Seneca and the Protestant Mind: The Influence of Stoicism on Puritan Ethics’, Archive fur Reformationsgeschichte, 74 (1983), 182–99.
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Smuts, R.M. (1999). Frames of Reference. In: Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27669-1_1
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