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. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone provides the first systematic account of the production, circulation and reception of these manuscript pamphlets. By placing them in the context of social change, state formation, and the emergence of 'politic' expertise, Millstone uses the pamphlets to resolve one of the central problems of early Stuart history: how and why did the men and women of early seventeenth-century England come to see their world as political?
This dissertation examines the place of handwritten tracts in the political life of early Stuart England. In the middle of the seventeenth century, England was rocked by civil war and revolution. Tracing the roots of those political upheavals in earlier decades has proved difficult and controversial. Recent work, however, has suggested that the key to the early Stuart regime's fortunes lay in the relationships between "high" political actors and "public" politics. These relationships were enormously complex, involving continuous negotiation and confrontation between elements of the early Stuart regime, different sorts of royal officers, church officials and various non-office holding subject populations including Catholics, women and the poor. This dimension of political life was also a major site for rivalry, competition and outright confrontation between actors making contrasting appeals for support. Such competition helped produce growing "political awareness" outside the circles of power; and the fact of this political awareness only increased the importance of public politics. This dissertation approaches this dynamic through the examination of a strangely neglected archive. Handwritten manuscripts were an important means for political communication and polemic during the early Stuart era and were critical to the development and popularization of "political awareness" in the decades before the English civil war. Through examining manuscript tracts from different angles, this dissertation argues that the political communication of the early Stuart era was much wider in its audience, more sophisticated in its methods and more powerful in its analysis than is usually appreciated. In a variety of circumstances, political actors both inside and outside the regime used manuscript circulation to manufacture consent and cooperation with regime policies or to disrupt regime projects; to further and defend their personal reputations; and to embarrass their rivals and enemies before a large audience. Early Stuart manuscript tracts--hundreds of which survive in thousands of copies--constitutes a corpus of political literature that dwarfs the output of the pre-1640 press. The sheer quantity of surviving manuscript tracts and the extensive evidence for circulation and reproduction all testify to the immense contemporary interest the tracts commanded. Their importance is confirmed by substantial ancillary evidence. Manuscript tracts were copied into diaries, passed to friends and relatives, purchased from scriveners and notaries and were subject to gossip and intense regime scrutiny. Surviving readers' notes document how readers used the tracts to acquire the habits of "political" thought. Across the kingdom, people learned to tell stories about politics: to interpret events by linking them together and imagining hidden causes. Through manuscript circulation, illicit political discourse--explicit attacks on major figures within the regime, hostile interpretations of government actions and denunciations of supposed plots against English liberties--became widely available and known. The production and circulation of manuscript tracts was an important tactical resource for political actors both inside and outside the regime; and the consumption of manuscript tracts was central to the spread of political ideas.
In recent years new schools of historiography and criticism have recast the political and cultural histories of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. However, for all the benefits of their insights, most revisionist historians have too narrowly focussed on high politics to the neglect of values and ideology, and New Historicist literary scholars have displayed an insufficient grasp of chronology and historical context. The contributors to this pioneering volume, richly fusing these approaches, apply a revisionist close attention to moments to the wide range of texts - verbal and visual - that critics have begun to read as representations of power and politics. Excitingly broadening the range of areas and evidence for the study of politics, these outstanding essays demonstrate how the study of high culture - classical translations, court portraits royal palaces, the conduct of chivalric ceremony - and low culture - cheap pamphlets and scurrilous verses - enable us to reconstruct the languages through which contemporaries interpreted their political environment. The volume posits a reconsideration of the traditional antithetical concepts - court and country, verbal and visual, critical and complimentary, elite and popular; examines the constructions of a moral and social order enacted in a wide variety of cultural practices; and demonstrates how common vocabularies could in changed circumstances be combined and deployed to sustain quite different ideological positions. This book opens a new agenda for the study of the politics of culture and the culture of politics in early modern England. -- Publisher's website.
Originally published in 1966, this text established itself as the standard work in 17th century English history in the course of time. The second edition includes a rewritten commentary and has been thoroughly revised and updated in several important areas.
Woolf details here the ways in which English men and women first became seriously aware of and interested in their own and the world's past. Previous works have focused exclusively on the writings of a small minority of historians, yet, through using a variety of manuscript and printed sources, this study examines the wider 'historical culture' within which historical and antiquarian studies could emerge.
This book shows how liberal education taught Tudor and Stuart monarchs to wield pens like swords and transformed political culture in early modern Britain.
"How were books in early modern England made, circulated, sold, stored, read, marked, altered, preserved, and destroyed? The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a stimulating account of the very newest work in the field, and an exploration of how new thinking might develop. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume combines lucidity, scholarly expertise, intellectual precision, and an imaginative structure that will enable contributors to show why the history of the book matters. This volume analyses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, and also considers critically how we can talk about the history of book"--
