Author Nacol shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Nacol explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control.

Dating from the mid-15th century, Apethorpe in Northamptonshire was home to a succession of leading courtiers and politicians. At the command of King James I, the house was refurbished with a richly decorated state apartment. The suite, with its series of rare plaster ceilings and carved chimneypieces, unquestionably ranks as one of the finest--and least known--in Britain. Written by architectural and archeological experts from Historic England, this monograph, the first on Apethorpe, is illustrated with new and historical photographs, paintings, maps, engravings, and specially commissioned interpretive drawings that reveal how the house looked at key moments in its history.

"In this collection of essays on aspects of the arts in Stuart England, fourteen distinguished scholars pay tribute to Sir Oliver Millar, whose preeminence as an authority on the visual arts in seventeenth-century England is well known. The essays concern themselves primarily with the aspects of portraiture from Van Dyck to Sir Godfrey Kneller, a genre in which Millar's discoveries have been invaluable, but they also embrace a wide range of subjects which are crucial to our understanding of the arts during the period: artistic techniques, church building, the masque, print making, town planning, tomb sculpture, prose portraiture, the patronage of writers, and the politics of the years of Personal Rule under Charles I. The essays provoke interesting comparisons with one another, and all reflect the recent trend of early modern studies in England in relating art history to the wider concerns of Stuart culture."--BOOK JACKET.

With essays on Van Dyck, Inigo Jones, and Isaac Besnier, sculptor to Charles I.

For the first time a detailed consideration of the scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production. Issues as disparate as reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and festivals are discussed, allowing the authors to examine how popular culture impacted upon the everyday lives and experiences of individuals and groups.

The plots, spymasters and double agents of Elizabeth's reign have attracted a good deal of attention of late. But the role of plot talk, conspiracy theory, and libellous secret histories, designed to unveil what was really going on in the courts and counsels of princes to popular audiences and publics, has not. Bad Queen Bess? argues that central aspects of Elizabethan policy are unintelligible outside of the context provided by these exchanges which were also foundational for a new style of public politics,framed by the unique confluence of religious division, confessional and geo-political conflict, and dynastic uncertainty bequeathed to post-reformation England by the peculiar marital and religious histories of Henry VIII and his children.

This book is the first in-depth study of the ceremonial and the music performed at these events over the past 400 years, from the funeral of Elizabeth I in 1603. Covering funerals of both royalty and non-royalty, including Nelson, Wellington and Churchill, this study goes up to the funerals of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 2002 and the ceremonial funeral of Baroness Thatcher in 2013. British Royal and State Funerals shows that, despite a strong emphasis on continuity in the choice of music, the ceremonial itself has shown an astonishing flexibility over the last four centuries. Overall, the book also contributes to the debate on the monarchy's changing public image over time by paying particular attention to topics such as tradition and propaganda.

This study of the character and policies of Charles I provides an analysis of the political crisis leading to his personal rule in England during the years before the civil wars. It fills a gap in the historical literature of the period by integrating ideological with political developments and English with international affairs.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central toThe Oxford Historyof Popular Print Culture, an ambitious nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present.

"Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure have long been debated in the context of mid-seventeenth-century crisis, but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture, and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artifacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller, and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change."--BOOK JACKET.

Narrative accounts with analysis concentrating on cultural history.

The late 17th and early 18th centuries saw profound changes in Britain and in its visual arts. This volume provides fresh perspectives on the arts, focusing on the concepts, spaces, and audiences of court, country, and city as reflected in an array of objects, materials, and places. The essays discuss the revolutionary political and economic circumstances of the period, which not only forged a new nation-state but also provided a structural setting for artistic production and reception. Contributions from 19 authors and 3 editors cover such diverse topics as tapestry in the age of Charles II and painting in the court of Queen Anne; male friendship portraits; mezzotint and the exchange between painting and print; the interpretation of genres such as still life and marine painting; the concept of remembered places; courtly fashion and furnishing; the codification of rules for painting; and the development of aesthetic theory.

In this work R. Malcolm Smuts examines the fundamental cultural changes that occurred within the English royal court between the last decade of the sixteenth century and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642.

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. 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.

No other woman in world history has been of such compulsive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of the 16th-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration.

The reconstitution of the royal court in 1660 brought with it the restoration of fears that had been associated with earlier Stuart courts: disorder, sexual liberty, popery and arbitrary government. This book - the first full examination of its subject - illustrates the ways in which court culture was informed by the heady politics of Britain between 1660 and 1685.

"Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England is a study of the structures of authority in England between the beginning of the English Reformation in 1529 and the outbreak of the Civil War of the 1640s. These structures, both secular and sacred, were profoundly affected by the creation of a national Protestant church governed by the crown; by the emerging sense of national consciousness and providential destiny that followed in its wake; by the development of a legal culture that defined and sometimes contested the parameters of authority; by an urban state that articulated a new civic culture and reflected broad political, social, and religious tensions; and by the growing sophistication and assertiveness of Parliament, the capstone both of elite interest and popular legitimacy, and ultimately the site of resistance to claims of unfettered royal and ecclesiastical power." "Together, these elements constituted the discourse of legitimacy through which the daily transactions of power in Tudor and early Stuart England were disputed, mediated, and sometimes resisted. They both expressed and contained the tensions of a rapidly changing society, and were finally the theaters on which its irreconcilable conflicts were enacted as social and political consensus broke down. The Discourse of Legitimacy presents a wide-ranging, synoptic view of England's political culture and its conflicts in the crucial period between its two greatest revolutions."--BOOK JACKET.

Dissing Elizabeth focuses on the criticism that cast a shadow on the otherwise celebrated reign of Elizabeth I. The essays in this politically and historically revealing book demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness and rage of rhetoric against the queen, illuminating the provocative discourse of disrespect and dissent that existed over an eighty-year period, from her troubled days as a princess to the decades after her death in 1603. As editor Julia M. Walker suggests, the breadth of dissent considered in this collection points to a dark side of the Cult of Elizabeth. Reevaluating neglected texts that had not previously been perceived as critical of the queen or worthy of critical appraisal, contributors consider dissent in a variety of forms, including artwork representing (and mocking) the queen, erotic and pornographic metaphors for Elizabeth in the popular press, sermons subtly critiquing her actions, and even the hostility encoded in her epitaph and in the placement of her tomb. Other chapters discuss gossip about Elizabeth, effigies of the queen, polemics against her marriage to the Duke of Alencon, common verbal slander, violence against emblems of her authority, and the criticism embedded in the riddles, satires, and literature of the period.

'Elizabeth I & Her People' explores the remarkable achievements and developments of the Elizabethan period through the portraits of those who brought them about.

This lavishly illustrated, multi-disciplinary volume approaches the Elizabethan world thematically. It conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, science, popular culture, the world of work and social practices fit together in an exciting world of change.

This pioneering work, the first serious analysis of the royal household between the middle ages and the eighteenth century, examines the internal workings of the court which was key to politics, and the personnel and organisation of the private royal apartments. It presents radical reinterpretation of the period as a whole, seeing the years from 1460 to 1640 as an essential unity - the age of personal court monarchy undivided by an imaginary 'revolution in government'.

"Several famous playwrights of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, including William Shakespeare, wrote for open-air public theatres and also for the private, indoor theatres at the palaces at which the Court resided. This book is the first full account of such court theatre, and examines the theatrical entertainments for Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I."--BOOK JACKET. "By contrast with the now vanished playhouses of the time, four of the royal chambers used as theatres survive, and the author attempts to draw as full a picture as he can of such places, the physical and aesthetic conditions under which actors worked in them, and the role of royal patronage in the growth of professional theatre, and offers a new definition of the function of theatrical occasions in creating the cultural profile of the English court."--BOOK JACKET.

The Face of Queenship investigates the aesthetic, political, and gender-related meanings in representations of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries. By attending to eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture, and discourses on beauty and cosmetics, this book shows how the portrayals of the queen's face register her contemporaries' hopes, fears, hatreds, mockeries, rivalries, and awe. In its application of theories of the meaning of the face and its exploration of the early modern representation and interpretation of faces, this study argues that the face was seen as a rhetorical tool and that Elizabeth was a master of using her face to persuade, threaten, or comfort her subjects.

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads more than 100 years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the 17th Century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, 17th Century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity.

Originally constructed in the late 16th century for the notorious Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, Hardwick Hall is now among the National Trust's greatest architectural landmarks, with much of its original interior and ornamentation still intact. Composed of extensive research and newly commissioned photography, this beautifully illustrated book traces the history of the house and its inhabitants through the centuries, showcasing a remarkable collection of portraiture, tapestries, furniture, and gardens, and providing readers with a genuine sense of the house's environment.

This book reveals honour’s complex role as a representational strategy amongst the aristocracy. Thomas’ erudite and detailed investigation of multi-generational family papers as well as legal records and prescriptive sources develops a fuller picture of how the concept of honour was employed, often in contradictory ways in daily life.

"Image Government shows how the art of the spin-doctor was widely practised in the second half of the seventeenth century. The author uses the work of authors such as Edmund Waller and painters such as Antonio Verrio to illuminate the changing ideologies of the late Stuart era and the way in which ideas about sovereignty were expressed by artists." "Image Government traces some of the cranks and windings, ebbings and flowings that lead from Charles I's downfall to Queen Anne's coronation as they are registered in printed literature and visual art. The poetry of Marvel and Dryden, multifarious political writings by greater and lesser figures, and the work of significant divines like the Whiggish Burnet, and Hickes, doyen of the nonjurers, are all used to show how the expression of ideas changed in the second half of the seventeenth century. While showing his awareness of the contributions of modern scholarship, the author displays a magisterial grasp of primary sources, often little exploited. The book explores aspects of sovereignty and the underlying principles of political cohesion for the benefit of students and scholars of later seventeenth-century literature, history and art."--BOOK JACKET.

Two kings, father and son...and yet, their personalities could hardly have differed more. Through sources as varied as masks, statues, poems, medals, and contemporary written records, a picture of these Stuart monarchs, their characters and their politics, emerges.

Veevers paints a vivid picture of Charles I's court by focusing on its French queen, Henrietta Maria. The author links the fastidious refinement of the queen's fashions & her belief in Platonic love with her Catholicism, showing the importance of this connection in the English court. Platonic images of beauty & love associated with the queen in court entertainment led the author to believe that these images were useful to the king in expressing his own political & religious aspirations.

Images of Rule offers a fascinating, authoritative, and highly readable account of the vital role the visual arts played in Great Britain during the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies. David Howarth examines the intersection of art and political power in Great Britain between the accession of the Tudors and the outbreak of civil war. The images of the Royal court constitute the raw material from which he fashions a cultural and political history of Renaissance Britain. Howarth concentrates on the public uses and political exploitation of Renaissance art, rather than its quality or the creative process behind it. He argues that the English ruling class used and manipulated works of art in order to reinforce its own power. Portraiture, architecture, the decorative arts, and spectacle all served to preserve England's political status quo.

In Imaging Stuart Family Politics, Catriona Murray explores the promotion of Stuart familial propaganda through the figure of the royal child. Bringing together royal ritual, court portraiture and popular prints, she offers a distinctive perspective on this crucial dimension of seventeenth-century political culture, exploring the fashioning and dismantling of reproductive imagery, as well as the vital role of visual display within these dialogues.

From an iconic portrait of a young Elizabeth I to the many paintings of Charles I by Flemish master Anthony van Dyck and the glamorous "Windsor Beauties" of the court of Charles II, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraiture has long been a source of great interest to costume historians. Given the scarcity of surviving garments, it also tells us most of what we know about Tudor and Stuart dress. We're all familiar with the stockings, voluminous breeches, and elaborate lace ruffs, but did you know that the clothing seen in many of these paintings cost more than the paintings themselves? Author Anna Reynolds, curator of paintings at the Royal Collection, has drawn on the art of the period, as well as wardrobe inventories, literary references, contemporary accounts, and surviving garments to offer a fascinating account of the elite fashions of the day and the ways in which they were recreated in paint. The main focus of Tudor and Stuart clothing was on rich materials that communicated the ability of the wearer to afford them, and, with the rise of the moneyed merchant class, sumptuary laws were established to limit their use to the nobility.

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) is widely acknowledged to have been England's most important architect. As court designer to the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, he is credited with introducing the classical language of architecture to the country.

The greatest paintings in today's most famous museums were once part of a fluid exchange determined by volatile political fortunes. In the first half of the 17th century, masterpieces by Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo, among others, were the objects of fervent pursuit by art connoisseurs. Francis Haskell traces the fate of collections extracted from Italy, Spain, and France by King Charles I and his circle, which, after a brief stay in Britain, were largely dispersed after the Civil War to princely galleries across the Continent. From vivid case studies of individual collectors, advisers, and artists, and acute analysis of personality and motive, Haskell challenges ideas about this episode in British cultural life and traces some of the factors that forever changed the artistic map of Europe.

"The first book to examine Queen Elizabeth I as a "learned prince," Learned Queen reveals a rather startling phenomenon: Elizabeth's educated status was crucial to England's burgeoning role as an international power. Examining Elizabeth's own demonstrations of erudition alongside literary works of such political luminaries as Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, this book reveals how poetry, foreign relations, and intellectual culture are far more integrated than we have hitherto imagined. From these connections emerges a methodology that places Elizabethan political culture and poetry fully on the transnational stage."--BOOK JACKET.

This study of the political attitudes of ordinary Londoners during the reign of Charles II examines not only the manifestations of public opinion - for example, riot and demonstration - but also the manner of its formation - religious experience, economic activity, and exposure to mass political propaganda.

In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type.

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated "display"--their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book follows Henrietta Maria to chart her patronage and engagement with the visual arts, building works, and the luxury trade. It develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen's directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display.

Includes thirty-seven new chapters written by leading international scholars on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution, Displays an interdisciplinary approach drawing on literature, history, religion, print culture, the history of reading, and women's writing, Chapters engage not only scholarly debates about the causes and effects of the English Revolution, but also broader historical and theoretical conversations about propaganda and print history, political opinion and the public sphere, early readers, literary history, history of genres, and women's roles in society, Provides a news lens on the literature of the civil war, situating canonical literary texts in their precise political, religious, and cultural contexts Book jacket.

The calculated use of the media by those in power is a phenomenon dating back at least to the seventeenth century, as Harold Weber demonstrates in this illuminating study of the relation of print culture to kingship under England's Charles II. Seventeenth-century London witnessed an enormous expansion of the print trade, and with this expansion came a revolutionary change in the relation between political authority - especially the monarchy - and the printed word. Weber argues that Charles's reign was characterized by a particularly fluid relationship between print and power. The press helped bring about both the deconsecration of divine monarchy and the formation of a new public sphere, but these processes did not result in the progressive decay of royal authority. Charles fashioned his own semiotics of power out of the political transformations that had turned his world upside down. By linking diverse and unusual topics - the escape of Charles from Worcester, the royal ability to heal scrofula, the sexual escapades of the "merry monarch," and the trial and execution of Stephen College - Weber reveals the means by which Charles took advantage of a print industry instrumental to the creation of a new dispensation of power, one in which the state dominates the individual through the supplementary relationship between signs and violence.

"Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism by reading reports of libertine, activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley, Libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. Webster argues that this eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences. Although this eruption was contained by the early 1680s, the libertine performances this book analyzes nevertheless played an important part in the history of English politics, drama, and sexuality."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is concerned with political culture, government, and religion during the personal rule of Charles II, the period between the dissolution of his last English Parliament in 1681 and his death in 1685. The author argues that the nature of this phase of Stuart personal rule was different to that of Charles I in 1629-40. He discusses the nature of whig and tory politics during this crucial period in their formation as political parties, showing how they coped with the absence of a parliamentary forum. He also examines political life in the English localities, the growing importance of news dissemination in political life, and the politics of religious persecution and toleration. Scotland and Ireland are included in this analysis of Charles's rule, setting the discussion in a 'Three Kingdoms' context.

Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680) was Charles II's Principal Painter and the outstanding artistic figure of Restoration England. When Lely arrived in England in the early 1640s his ambition was to be a painter of narrative scenes and not to work as a portraitist. However, the 'subject pictures' did not find favour with many English patrons and he produced less than thirty. As Lely's friend Richard Lovelace explained, all they wanted was "their own dull counterfeits" or portraits of their mistresses. Thus, Lely was obliged to turn to portraiture to make a living. Yes, his poetic pictures of figures in idyllic landscapes are among the most beautiful paintings made in 17th-century England and this catalogue will be the first in-depth look at this important chapter of this major painter's career.

This book surveys the channels through which political ideas and knowledge were conveyed to the English people from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the Revolution of 1688. Shapiro argues that an assessment of English political culture requires an examination of all means by which this culture was expressed and communicated. While the discussion focuses primarily on genres such as the sermon, newsbook, poetry, and drama, it also considers the role of events and institutions. Shapiro is the first to explore and elucidate the entire web of communication in early modern English political life.

Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque treats the Jacobean masque as engaged with a broad range of ideas, issues and texts from other political arenas rather than as an exclusive tool of monarchy and court culture. Building on James I's own sense of the monarchical stage as a site of scrutiny not adulation, this book traces the masque's involvement in political events, such as the crises and scandals that provoke political debate, to argue for a form that is more experimental and more intensively concerned with how to articulate political criticism.

"The return of Charles II to the English throne after eleven years of interregnum heralded the beginning of a new era in which the court was characterized by the licentious behavior of the new king. This book brings together ten distinguished scholars of history, literature, music, theater, and art to explore the political and cultural implications of the court's transgressive new character. With particular reference to the perception and representation of women, it offers a varied examination of topics including popular prints and broadsheets, court masque, poetry and painted portraits, and the operation of women in the political sphere."--BOOK JACKET.

"Every spring and summer of her forty-four years as queen, Elizabeth I (1533-1603) insisted that her court go "on progress," a series of royal visits to towns and aristocratic homes in southern England. These trips provided the only direct contact most people had with a monarch who made popularity a cornerstone of her reign. Public appearances gave the queen a stage on which to interact with her subjects in a calculated effort to keep their support. The progresses were both emblematic of Elizabeth's rule and intrinsic to her ability to govern." "In this book, Mary Hill Cole provides a detailed analysis of the progresses. Drawing on royal household accounts, ministerial correspondence, county archives, corporation records, and family papers, she examines the effects of the visits on the queen's household and government, the individual and civic hosts, and the monarchy of the Virgin Queen."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Princes to Act, Matthew Wikander explores royal court performance from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when plays with monarchs as characters were typically performed before royal audiences. Focusing on the courts of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I of England, Louis XIV and Louis XV of France, and Gustav III of Sweden, Wikander finds that the close and complex relationships between professional theaters and royal patrons infused imperial politics with irony and theatricality - as actors and audiences learned the secret that playing the king and being the king were surprisingly similar."

This text traces British printmaking from its Netherlandish roots in the London of James I and Charles I through to the later decades of the century. The author focuses on the role and influence of print publishers and sellers, and draws comparisons between the business of printmaking then and now, as well as documenting the careers of the most significant publishers.

In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography, James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and in unprecedented cultural context. Demonstrating the extent to which Anne's patronage was informed by her practice, Winn shows how poets, painters, and musicians used the worksthey made for Anne to send overt and covert political messages to the queen, the court, the church, and Parliament. Richly illustrated with visual and musical examples, Winn draws on works by a wide array of artists, among them composer George Frideric Handel, poet Alexander Pope, painter Godfrey Kneller, and architect Christopher Wren, to shed new light on Anne's life and reign.

During the Elizabethan era, beliefs about women's susceptibility to emotion intersected with debates about monarchical power and equity in law to make 'mercy' a particularly complex concept. It made frequent appearances in the work of writers of the era such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and others who explored the wellsprings of clemency and its role in society. Through a fresh reading of such depictions, author Mary Villeponteaux shows that, under Elizabeth I, mercy was contested both conceptually and in practice and that its cultural representation was directly shaped by tensions surrounding the exercise of judgment by a woman on the throne.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of aristocratic art collecting and patronage in Elizabethan England, as seen through the activities of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (ca. 1532-1588). He amassed a substantial art collection, including commissioned works by Nicholas Hilliard, Paolo Veronese, and Federico Zuccaro; helped foster the birth of an English vernacular discourse on the visual arts; and was an early exponent, in England, of the Italian Renaissance view of the painter as the practitioner of a liberal art and, thus, fit company for the educated and well-born.

This volume deals with the crisis in the representation of the monarchy that was provoked by the execution of Charles I. It looks at both sympathetic and hostile representations of Charles I and addresses not only the period of mid-century crisis but also the earlier years of his reign and the afterlife of his royal image. Besides courtly and popular literary representations, it examines Charles's visual image in paintings, sculpture, engravings and coins and considers the role of the King's Music in projecting a positive view of the monarch.

The royal touch was the religious healing ceremony at which the monarch stroked the sores on the face and necks of people who had scrofula in order to heal them in imitation of Christ. The rite was practised by all the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns apart from William III, reaching its zenith during the Restoration when some 100,000 people were touched by Charles II and James II. This book, the first devoted to the royal touch for almost a century, integrates political, religious, medical and intellectual history. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including images, coins, medals, and playing cards, as well as manuscripts and printed texts, it provides an important new perspective on the evolving relationship between politics, medicine and sin in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, these essays present a cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions. Relevant essays include: "Did the English Have a Script for Revolution in the Seventeenth Century?" and "God's Revolutions: England, Europe, and the Concept of Revolution in the Mid-seventeenth Century".

"The management of image in the service of power is a familiar tool of twenty-first century politics. Here a leading historian reveals how, from even before the Reformation, the Tudors sought to sustain and enhance their authority by representing themselves to their people through the media of building, print, art, material culture and speech. Deploying what we might now describe as 'spin, Tudor rulers worked actively as patrons and popularisers to present themselves to the best advantage." "This first sustained analysis of the verbal and visual representations of Tudor power embraces art history, literary studies and the history of consumption and material culture. It reflects years of study of the texts, pictures, modes and forms of representation which circulated images of authority to a public increasingly eager to acquire them."--BOOK JACKET.

Soon after James Stuart became king of England in 1603, William Shakespeare, while still working in the public theater, became the royal playwright, and his acting troupe became the premier playing company of the realm. How did this courtly setting influence Shakespeare's work? What was it like to view, perform in, and write plays conceived for the Stuart king? In this fascinating and lively book, one of our most eminent literary critics explores these questions by taking us back to the court performances of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, examining them in their settings at the royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court. Alvin Kernan looks at Shakespeare as a patronage playwright whose work after 1603 focused on the main concerns of his royal patron: divine-right kingship in Lear, the corruption of the court in Antony, the difficulties of the old military aristocracy in Coriolanus, and other vital matters. Kernan argues that Shakespeare was neither the royal propagandist nor the political subversive that the New Historicists have made him out to be. He was, instead, a great dramatist whose plays commented on political and social concerns of his patrons and who sought the most satisfactory way of adjusting his art to court needs.

Backscheider offers three detailed examples of how popular literature participates in important social processes in which public opinion and acceptance are at stake. The case studies involve London street pageants staged from 1659 to 1662, the London theatrical season of 1695-96, when one third of the new plays performed were written by women.and gothic drama in the period 1788-89. Backscheider illustrates the various ways in which literature participates in the ideological struggle for intellectual, moral, and philosophical dominance in a society.

This interdisciplinary collection examines the multiple ties that connected the Stuart court to Europe, and the ways in which these shaped English politics and political culture. Together, the essays demonstrate that even the domestic history of the period can only be understood fully by taking into account the international horizons, concerns and affiliations of the British ruling elite.

"Court masques were multi-media entertainments, with song, dance, theater, and changeable scenery, staged annually at the English court to celebrate the Stuart dynasty. They have typically been regarded as frivolous and expensive entertainments. This book dispels this notion, emphasizing instead that they were embedded in the politics of the moment, and spoke in complex ways to the different audiences who viewed them. Covering the whole period from Queen Anne s first masque at Winchester in 1603 to Salmacida Spolia in 1640, Butler looks in depth at the political functions of state festivity. The book contextualizes masque performances in intricate detail, and analyzes how they shaped, managed, and influenced the public face of the Stuart kingship. Butler presents the masques as a vehicle through which we can read the early Stuart court s political aspirations and the changing functions of royal culture in a period of often radical instability."--BOOK JACKET.

For nearly half of the eighteenth century, the exiled Stuart court provided an important British presence in Rome. It acted as a surrogate embassy for the many Grand Tourists passing through the city - Hanoverian Whigs as well as Tories and Jacobites - and as a significant social and cultural centre. This book presents the first complete study of the court of the exiled Stuart King James III, offering a significant reassessment of its importance and of the lives of the Stuarts and their courtiers, and their relations with the Popes, cardinals and princely families of Rome.

To gain a full understanding of the literature and history of early modern England, students need to study the prose of the period. Aiming to make early modern prose more visible to teachers, this volume approaches prose as a genre that requires as much analysis and attention as the drama and poetry of the time. The essays collected here consider the broad cultural questions raised by prose and explore prose style, showing teachers how to hone students' writing skills in the process.

This book represents the first detailed study into English royal funeral ceremonies of the period, building on earlier scholarship dealing with the French royal funeral and with the social history of death and burial in early modern England. Funeral rituals are approached as performances, and placed in their political, religious and broader cultural contexts, showing them to be a microcosm of cultural change.

This beautiful book explores the diplomatic, trade and cultural exchanges between the courts of Britain and Russia, from the reign of Henry VIII to the death of Charles II. Through the material life of the courts, the gifts of the diplomats and the commissions of the monarchs, the book presents an overview of privileged living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - illustrating the material life of the leading personalities of the period. Engaging and authoritative, Treasures of the Royal Courts uses superb new photography to illustrate chapters on diplomacy, silver, portraits, miniatures, arms and armor, heraldry, textiles and jewelry by experts from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Kremlin Museum, Moscow.

"Tudor Court Culture is an innovative interdisciplinary collection. It comprises original research by leading and emerging scholars working on the history, literature, and culture of sixteenth-century England. Tudor Court Culture will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying the Tudor court from a historical and cultural perspective as well as scholars with a general interest in early European Renaissance courts."--BOOK JACKET.

The Tudor monarchs and their courtiers were depicted in magnificent style, in farthingales and ruffs, furs and jewels, codpieces and cloaks, and vast expanses of velvet and silk. Far from being mere decoration, fashion was pivotal in the communication of status and power. Evidence from rare surviving garments and textiles, original documents, fine and decorative art, and archaeological findings enhance our understanding of the Tudors and their courts.

This book of original scope and methodology consists of twelve interdisciplinary essays on the 'high' political culture of Tudor and early Stuart England. Through the exploitation of new manuscript material or hitherto untapped artistic sources - the plates reproduce over sixty contemporary images - the authors open up new perspectives on the ideas, institutions, and rituals of political society. Drawing on the evidence of art and literature, and using the latest techniques for the discovery of lost mentalities, key aspects of Tudor political culture are explored, including royal iconography, funereal symbolism, parliamentary elections, political vocabularies, kinship and family at court and in the country, and the architecture of urban authority. In his Introduction the editor uses the example of Henry VIII's historical break with Rome to suggest the seamless links between politics and political culture, how and why the revolution of the 1530s needs to be seen against the backdrop of early-Tudor memories of Henry V, the cult of chivalry and the invasion of France (1513), and the pre-Reformation imagery of 'imperial' kingship.

This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. The chapter on the artist's English period include many portraits of Charles I, the royal family, and members of the court.

Imbued with an understated authority and relaxed elegance, van Dyck's portraits of the British royal family were an instant success. Charles I was depicted as both a powerful sovereign and "nature's gentleman." Gorgeously illustrated, this comprehensive volume is the most thorough examination of van Dyck's years in Britain to date, and investigates the intriguing ways in which van Dyck influenced British art and culture in the centuries following his death.

The British Archaeological Association's 2013 conference was devoted to the study of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster. This was the first time that the internationally important complex of historic buildings was examined holistically, and the papers published here cover a wide range of subject matter. . Part I begins with studies of the topography of the area, an account of its Roman-period finds and the archaeology of the Abbey. Part II deals with the Palace of Westminster between the late 11th century and the devastating fire of 1834 that largely destroyed the medieval palace, and the building of the New Palace which is better known today as the Houses of Parliament.