Shining new light onto an historically pivotal time, this book re-examines the Tudor commonwealth from a socio-political perspective and looks at its links to its own past. Each essay in this collection addresses a different aspect of the intellectual and cultural climate of the time, going beyond the politics of state into the underlying thought and tradition that shaped Tudor policy. Placing security and economics at the centre of debate, the key issues are considered in the context of medieval precedence and the wider European picture.
The Reformation of the sixteenth-century is commonly seen as the transitional period between the medieval and the modern worlds. This study examines the political thought of England during its period of religious reform from the reign of Edward VI to the death of Elizabeth I. The political thought of Tudor ecclesiastics was heavily informed by the institutional and intellectual upheavals in England and on the continent, producing tensions between traditional ways of conceptualising politics and new religious and political realities. This book offers a study of natural law, providentialism, cosmic order, political authority, and government by consent in Protestant political thought during a transitional period in English history. It shows how the Reformation was central to the birth of modern political thought.
This is a guide to the vast amount of literature on the history of political thought which has appeared in English since 1945. The editors provide an annotation of the content of many entries and, where appropriate, indicate their significance, controversial nature and readability.
Focusing on the interaction of religion and politics, this is a comprehensive chronological survey of the political thought of post-Reformation Britain which examines the work of a wide range of thinkers.
How the American executive office was constructed in the Constitution and implemented by the first presidents This volume examines the political ideas behind the construction of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution, as well as how these ideas were implemented by the nation's early presidents. The framers of the Constitution disagreed about the scope of the new executive role they were creating, and this volume reveals the ways the duties and power of the office developed contrary to many expectations. Here, leading scholars of the early republic examine principles from European thought and culture that were key to establishing the conceptual language and institutional parameters for the American executive office. Unpacking the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, these essays describe how the Constitution left room for the first presidents to set patterns of behavior and establish a range of duties to make the office functional within a governmental system of checks and balances. Contributors explore how these presidents understood their positions and fleshed out their full responsibilities according to the everyday operations required to succeed. As disputes continue to surround the limits of executive power today, this volume helps identify and explain the circumstances in which limits can be imposed on presidents who seem to dangerously exceed the constitutional parameters of their office. Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency demonstrates that this distinctive, time-tested role developed from a fraught, historically contingent, and contested process. Contributors: Claire Rydell Arcenas Lindsay M. Chervinsky François Furstenberg Jonathan Gienapp Daniel J. Hulsebosch Ben Lowe Max Skjönsberg Eric Slauter Caroline Winterer Blair Worden Rosemarie Zagarri A volume in the Alan B. and Charna Larkin Series on the American Presidency
Whilst much recent research has dealt with the popular response to the religious change ushered in during the mid-Tudor period, this book focuses not just on the response to broad liturgical and doctrinal change, but also looks at how theological and reform messages could be utilized among local leaders and civic elites. It is this cohort that has often been neglected in previous efforts to ascertain the often elusive position of the common woman or man. Using the Vale of Gloucester as a case study, the book refocuses attention onto the concept of "commonwealth" and links it to a gradual, but long-standing dissatisfaction with local religious houses. It shows how monasteries, endowed initially out of the charitable impulses of elites, increasingly came to depend on lay stewards to remain viable. During the economic downturn of the mid-Tudor period, when urban and landed elites refocused their attention on restoring the commonwealth which they believed had broken down, they increasingly viewed the charity offered by religious houses as insufficient to meet the local needs. In such a climate the Protestant social gospel seemed to provide a valid alternative to which many people gravitated. Holding to scrutiny the revisionist revolution of the past twenty years, the book reopens debate and challenges conventional thinking about the ways the traditional church lost influence in the late middle ages, positing the idea that the problems with the religious houses were not just the creation of the reformers but had rather a long history. In so doing it offers a more complete picture of reform that goes beyond head-counting by looking at the political relationships and how they were affected by religious ideas to bring about change.
This book investigates the norms and values of Tudor and early-Stuart politics, which are considered in the contexts of law and the Reformation, legal and administrative institutions, and classical and legal humanism. Main themes include 'imperial' monarchy and the theory of 'counsel', Parliament and the royal supremacy, conciliar politics and organization, the relationship of law and equity, and the jurisdictional rivalry between the courts of common law and canon law. The author argues that norms of Tudor England were sufficiently pluralist to satisfy both 'absolutist' and 'constitutionalist' aspirations, whereas by 1628 they proved no longer effective as a mechanism for the orderly conduct of politics. The clash between two conflicting sets of values was translated into a clash of ideologies.
With its challenging, paradoxical thesis that Elizabethan England was a 'republic which happened also to be a monarchy', Patrick Collinson's 1987 essay 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I' instigated a proliferation of research and lively debate about quasi-republican aspects of Tudor and Stuart England. In this volume, a distinguished international group of scholars examines the idea of the 'monarchical republic' from the 1530s to the 1640s, and tests the concept from a variety of points of view. New suggestions are advanced about the pattern of development of quasi-republican tendencies and of opposition to them, and about their relation to the politics of earlier and later periods. A number of essays focus on the political activity of leading figures at court; several analyse political life in towns or rural areas; others discuss education, rhetoric, linguistic thought and reading practices, poetic and dramatic texts, the relations of politics to religious conflict, gendered conceptions of the monarchy, and 'monarchical republicanism' in the new American colonies. Differing positions in the scholarly debate about early modern English republicanism are represented, and fresh archival research advances the study of quasi-republican elements in early modern English politics.
Attending to the importance of context and decorum, this major contribution to Ideas in Context recovers a tradition of free speech that has been obscured in studies of the evolution of universal rights."--BOOK JACKET.
