England, 1485-1642

Introduction
The scholarship on Tudor and Stuart England constitutes a parallel universe in its own right, with its sometimes acrimonious debates threatening to paralyze the student (and even specialist) from coming to any clarity or conclusions at all (unless, perhaps, he or she simply submits to the latest historiographical orthodoxy). Aside from the English Civil War, which has been called the “Mount Everest” of English scholarship, debates have centered upon whether the Reformation was “top down” or “bottom up”: religion as a whole was Protestant, Catholic, or something in between; the nobility and the gentry in crisis or ascendant; the Restoration representative of continuity or change; and the events of 1688 momentous, or not. Terms such as “revisionism,” “postrevisionism,” or “neo-Whiggism” convey such confusion, but they are unavoidable when it comes to entering, on a deeper level, the notoriously vexed scholarship of the period. Such debates also testify to the extremely rich nature of the Tudor and Stuart period in England, which continues to yield new insights, interpretations, and conclusions regarding political culture, social relations, the nature of religious belief and allegiance, or causality when it comes to an event as momentous as the civil war. The following entry is limited to the most important or representative works, including studies whose claims have been long discredited or put aside but nevertheless remain important in conveying the full scope of the research an`d conclusions yielded by the subject at hand. Many more sources (and subjects) could have been added, just as databases such as the Royal Historical Society’s annual bibliography continue to list hundreds of new books and articles each year.
Textbooks
A number of excellent textbooks exist on Tudor and Stuart England, though with the exception ofBucholz and Key 2009 and Smith 1997, they tend to divide the Tudor and Stuart periods. Guy 1988provides one of the best overviews of the Tudor age, with an emphasis on politics, while the 17th century is best represented by Kishlansky 1997, which also focuses on politics, and Coward 2003, which incorporates more extensive economic and social history. More recent studies such asBrigden 2000 and Nicholls 1999 have also taken care to incorporate Ireland (in Brigden’s case especially) and the British Isles into the history, and to provide some overview of the historiographical debates.
Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603. New York: Viking, 2000.
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A well-presented narrative of the Tudor century, incorporating new approaches and particularly strong in its presentation of Ireland and the Atlantic world.
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Bucholz, Robert, and Newton Key. Early Modern England, 1485–1714: A Narrative History. 2nd ed. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
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An excellent narrative and analytical approach that incorporates social, economic, religious, and cultural as well as political history.
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Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714. 3d ed. London: Longman, 2003.
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The best recent textbook on the Stuart age, utilizing the latest scholarship and focusing on the economy, society, and politics as well as the civil war and its aftermath. Very useful bibliographic essay at the end and relatively good coverage of Scotland and Ireland.
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Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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Perhaps the best analytical narrative and overview of Tudor England, incorporating original research and conclusions. Above all a political history, the work concludes that the Tudor reigns, including Elizabeth’s, were in large part a success and certainly transformative of the English polity by the end of the century.
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Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714. London: Penguin, 1997.
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A clear and well-written political narrative designed for the student and nonspecialist, extending from the reign of James I through Anne and tracing developments in the institution of the monarchy and also including the parallel histories of Scotland and Ireland.
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Nicholls, Mark. A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529–1603: The Two Kingdoms. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
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An ambitious study that encompasses Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well as England, including distinctly non-Anglocentric perspectives. Nicholls explicitly rejects the notion that any common or unifying “themes” underlay or brought together these kingdoms, nor that there was any idea or policy of “Britishness” other than the imposition of England’s will on others.
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Smith, A. G. R. The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660. 2d ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd., 1997.
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One of the best surveys of England, beginning with the Reformation and continuing through the English civil war, with useful introductions to the historiographical debates, and excellent maps, glossaries, and bibliography.
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Reference Works
Encyclopedic and reference material on the period is fairly extensive, with Coward 2003 providing one of the better introductions, and Matthew and Harrison 2004 providing good recent assessments of the subjects and personalities involved. O’Day 1995 and Wroughton 1997, part of the Longman Companion series, are also effective, though they are two of many such guides. The abundance of material now available online has revolutionized the scholarship of Tudor and Stuart England, with Early England Books Online allowing students and specialists to search a huge array of primary sources in their original, unedited format. Meanwhile, the parliamentary and ecclesiastical records made available through British History Online have also allowed scholars to peruse documents previously viewable only in bulky and aged volumes.
British History Online.
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A digital library that covers the Tudor and Stuart period as well as the Middle Ages in Britain, created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. The inclusion of the State Papers is particularly important, but other nonpolitical areas are also covered.
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Coward, Barry, ed. A Companion to Stuart Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
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An excellent introduction to the period, its series of chapters written by leading specialists offering perspectives on the events at hand and reflecting the most recent scholarship. Gender relations, popular protest, print culture, crime, architecture, the rise of the fiscal state, political thought, and religion are all covered.
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Early English Books Online.
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Available only to subscribing institutions, this invaluable and searchable resource contains an exhaustive collection of primary sources from the Tudor and Stuart period, appearing in both their original facsimile form as well as many transcriptions.
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Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 60 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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An invaluable resource in researching individuals in Tudor and Stuart England from the prominent to the most obscure. Available online and in print, this recently revised, sixty-volume work also contains illustrations and helpful bibliographic information from each contribution.
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O’Day, Rosemary, ed. The Longman Companion to the Tudor Age. London: Longman, 1995.
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A useful student reference, with maps, genealogical tables, and chronologies, and sections on central and local government, population, biographies of hundreds of figures, and a glossary of terms.
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Wroughton, John, ed. The Longman Companion to the Stuart Age: 1603–1714. London: Longman, 1997.
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A dictionary of over 200 specialist terms in addition to detailed chronologies related to domestic and foreign affairs, military developments, colonial matters, offices of state, and other information. Scotland and Ireland merit lengthy treatment.
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Bibliographies
Tudor and Stuart England is subject to continuous debate, but the Bibliography of British and Irish History provides the most up-to-date material published each year. For older sources, including primary sources, Read 1978 remains useful, and Morrill 1980 provides perhaps the best critical survey and assessment of more recent scholarship
Bibliography of British and Irish History.
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An excellent resource that contains the most up-to-date secondary source material, including articles as well as books. Replaces the Royal Historical Society bibliography. The new service, produced by a partnership between the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research, and Brepols Publishers, is avaialbe by subscription. Irish material is still available at Irish History Online.
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Gee, Austin, ed. Royal Historical Society Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999–.
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An indispensable guide to books and articles published each year, divided by period and topic, with a good index. The CD-ROM version (The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM: The History of Britain, Ireland, and the British Overseas), which includes approximately 250,000 records detailing books and articles published between 1901 and 1992, and many from before then, is also available from Oxford University Press.
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Morrill, John. Seventeenth Century Britain, 1603–1714. Critical Bibliographies in Modern History. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980.
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A useful guide divided into sections covering government and politics, and constitutional, ecclesiastical, economic, cultural, and social history, with an emphasis on the latest research up to that point. Critical and descriptive comments, including introductions, accompany the books and articles.
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Read, Conyers. Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period, 1485–1603. 2d ed. Hassocks, UK: Harvester, 1978.
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A monumental work that covers thousands of sources, heavily annotated and cross referenced, and including local histories as well as Scotland and a huge range of other subject matter. Remains the best bibliography on the Tudor age, compiled and edited by one of its leading historians. Originally published in 1959.
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Primary Source Collections
Primary source collections are extensive with many now available online. The following is a basic selected list, with an admittedly political focus, with Douglas 1953–1977 providing an excellent collection of primary documents, and Elton 1982 and Kenyon 1986 focusing on the Tudor and Stuart periods respectively. Students should also consult the extensive collection of State Papers, withLemon and Green 1856–1872 constituting a representative sample.
Douglas, C. D., Williams, C. H., et al., eds. English Historical Documents. Vols. 4–10. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953–1977.
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One of the more ambitious and comprehensive collections of primary documents, published over the course of twenty-five years. Each volume contains about a thousand pages of material, with the Tudor and Stuart period receiving extensive coverage.
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Elton, G. R., ed. The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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A very good collection of source material, with updated commentary in the second edition. Good bibliography, though the work as a whole tends to primarily cover political history.
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Kenyon, J. P., ed. The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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A well-chosen collection of documents, including local material, and with good commentary offering historical perspective.
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Lemon, Robert, Mary Anne Everett Green, eds. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth I, and James I. 146 vols. London: Public Record Office, 1856–1872.
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Papers both private and official of secretaries of state relating to home affairs, including political and religious policies, economic affairs, crown possessions, social directives as well as foreign policy.
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Journals
The English Historical Review, Historical Research, Historical Journal, and Past and Presentrepresent the best of the English journals, with the Transactions of the Royal Historical Societyserving as the oldest journal in the group. The Journal of British Studies is a good stateside contribution, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History Review is one of the best for religious matters, British and otherwise.
English Historical Review (1886–).
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Contains studies of British and world history with very useful “Notes and Documents” articles as well as debates on early modern themes and an annual summary of the periodical literature published.
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Historical Research (1923–).
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British and world history from the Middle Ages through the present, with many articles on early modern England written by established experts as well as emerging scholars.
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Historical Journal (1958–).
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An important journal that includes British history; especially strong on launching significant articles by younger as well as established authors.
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Journal of British Studies (1961–).
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The official publication of the North American Conference of British Studies (and also incorporating the former Albion), this journal draws on all aspects of British culture and history from the middle ages through the present, with special strengths in religious, cultural, and social history.
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Journal of Ecclesiastical History Review (1950–).
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Publishes all aspects of the Christian Church throughout history and across national lines, with nearly every issue containing at least one entry regarding early modern religion in England.
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Past and Present (1952–).
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The Oxford University Press journal covering all aspects of world and British history, with lively debates and responses among historians. Past articles have been particularly important for scholarly contributions and controversies regarding the 17th century and the Civil War.
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1872–).
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Publishing for more than 150 years, this annual Cambridge University Press volume presents work from new and established scholars on all facets of British history, with some very helpful overviews of the current state of scholarship, or important multipart contributions by G. R. Elton, for example, on governmental institutions in the Tudor period.
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Fifteenth-Century England
The 15th century in England was once dismissed as a politically confusing and culturally dreary period of transition—a time of darkness that preceded the Tudor light. Not only is such an assessment unfair, but it fails to consider the period on its own terms. Recent turns toward the study of “political culture” rather than institutional politics alone have offered enriching new interpretations regarding the period, while the Wars of the Roses have been similarly revised, particularly in terms of the level of their violence and the role of the nobility. The long kingship of Henry VI has also been given a more balanced treatment, while Richard III continues to be rescued from Shakespeare’s maligning pen. Finally, the transmission and impact of humanism in the century has merited a significant amount of attention, just as the religious life and Catholic practices of the period have been convincingly depicted as carrying a vibrancy that would continue well into the next century.
SOCIETY AND CULTURE
A large number of specialist studies and general introductory volumes have been published on this period, redeeming it from its reputation as a century marked by civil conflict and cultural and political decline. Most of the works, such as Davies 1976, Britnell 1997 and Thomson 1983, find continuities between the social, religious, and political developments of the 15th century and the Tudor era to come, while Keen 1990 (see Politics and Political Culture) and Lander 1977 provide good general investigations of the century itself.
Britnell, Richard. The Closing of the Middle Ages? England 1471–1529. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
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A useful thematic study that begins with the reign of Edward IV and ends with the death of Cardinal Wolsey, analyzing the period’s political life—including kingship, court, and parliament—as well as economic developments, religious life, and local society.
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Davies, C. S. L. Peace, Print, and Protestantism, 1450–1558. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1976.
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A good survey of the period, though stronger on the 15th century. Argues against distinctions between “medieval” and “early modern,” with continuities exceeding any hard disruption. Among other points of emphasis are the fluidities of allegiance in the Wars of the Roses, and the illusion of power, rather than the reality, created by the Tudor governments.
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Lander, J. R. Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England. 3d ed. London: Hutchinson, 1977.
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A good overview of the period, particularly in its coverage of the social and economic sphere, though the political and cultural are also examined.
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Thomson, J. A. F. The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370–1529. New York: Longman, 1983.
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An excellent and wide-ranging study of the period that emphasizes continuities and transformations between the late medieval and Tudor and Stuart periods, particularly in the realm of economic and social developments, finance and demographics, and most strongly, the pre-Reformation and Reformation church.
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POLITICS AND POLITICAL CULTURE
Fifteenth-century politics, as one writer once put it, has been “over-researched,” revised and re-revised. Recently, the “new constitutional history” and the concept of political culture, advocated by Edward Powell and Christine Carpenter, have been applied with fruitful results to the period, revivifying the work that began with Chrimes 1978. For recent treatments, see Hicks 2002 andLander 1980.
Chrimes, S. B. English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century. New York: AMS Press, 1978.
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An older account of late medieval constitutionalism, arguing for 15th-century theorists finding sovereignty “not in the king but in the law.” In describing newer visions of the constitutional limitation on the king, Chrimes examines 15th-century monarchies and parliament—and their relations—as well as theories of the state, the royal prerogative, and statutory law.
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Hicks, Michael A. English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2002.
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Examines the Wars of the Roses through the prism of what Hicks argues was an essentially stable English political culture in the 15th century. Useful discussions of political governance and machinery, perceptions of the law, class, and corruption, and the interactions of various estates across the realm.
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Keen, M. H. England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
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A narrative history of the later Middle Ages, particularly the impact of politics and war on society. The 14th century is examined at length, but the 15th century also merits treatment, with the more effective control over nobility and gentry exerted by Edward IV, contrasted with the case of France.
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Lander, J. R. Government and Community: England, 1450–1509. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
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A major study of the period examining economic and royal finance issues, political life, aristocracy and kingship, and education and the arts. Particularly strong are the extensive discussions of religious and vibrant spiritual life of pre-Reformation England.
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CROWN AND NOBILITY
Fifteenth-century kings, and Richard III particularly, used to be read through the prism of Tudor propaganda (and Shakespeare), but recent studies have complicated the picture, despite the problematic nature of a reign such as Henry VI’s. For good examples of such studies, see Ross 1981, Griffiths 2004, and Ross 1974. Kingship within the context of political culture and governance has also received incisive treatment by Lander 1976 and others. Many discussions of the nobility in this period have centered on the concept of “bastard feudalism,” derived from Charles Plummer and William Stubbs in the 19th century, and used to describe a destabilizing form of society in which vassals, previously rendering service to the lord, paid a portion of their income instead, bringing him to rely on hired retainers constituting a kind of private army. The concept was subsequently contested and remains highly problematic today; nevertheless, many historical works such as Hicks 1995 continue to utilize the concept, though they bring forward a positive portrait of the nobility in general during the age, against previous suppositions.
Griffiths, R. A. The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1462. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004.
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An exhaustive coverage of the reign of Henry VI, with thematic chapters broken down according to topics such as the royal household and patronage, the nature of royal government as a whole, the management of crises during the king’s collapse, the workings of the nobility, and the resilience of the reign in general.
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Hicks, Michael. Bastard Feudalism. London: Longman, 1995.
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A comprehensive synthesis of the theories and history regarding bastard feudalism, or the parallel system (alongside tenurial feudalism) of nonlanded aristocratic administration, private armies, and local affinities that governed England from the Middle Ages through 1650. Hicks argues for the persistence and legitimate functions of such a system of reciprocal contacts, of clientage and patronage, particularly in the later Middle Ages.
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Lander, J. R. Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976.
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A collection of essays by Lander with extensive discussion of the historiographical debates (including the author’s own theories), as well as analysis and reassessment of the crown and its relations with rich landowners, Yorkist feudalism, and the “essential” role of bastard feudalism in the governance of the country.
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Ross, Charles. Edward IV. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
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Written by one of the leading authorities of the period, this excellent biography, according to the author, “is essentially a study in the power politics of late-medieval England,” including the “ways and means of gaining and keeping power” on the part of the aristocracy. Also explores the court and council, relations with the nobility and the commons, and royal finance and law enforcement.
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Ross, Charles. Richard III. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
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An enlightening biography of Richard III, getting beneath the myth and legend to understand the king, especially in the years before his relatively brief reign. Useful discussions of Shakespeare’s play about him as well as Richard’s general reputation during his time and beyond.
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WARS OF THE ROSES
As Christine Carpenter has written, the Wars of the Roses “have been a problem to historians almost from the moment they occurred,” not least because contemporary accounts tended to be “devoid of any explanation for what happened.” Nineteenth-century historians tended to view the age itself as one of transition before the “victorious reign” of the Tudors—later amended—which made the wars a reflection of feudalist chaos and governmental weakness. With the revision of this picture, the nobility of the period has been redeemed, and the violence of the wars minimized—or at least, as Carpenter 1997 puts it, “no one is now pressing for a return to the picture of wholesale destruction over a thirty-year period” (p. 21). Though books on the subject are plentiful, for a reflection of these newer views, see Carpenter 1997 and, particularly regarding the military perspective, Goodman 1981.
Carpenter, Christine. The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Drawing on the legacy of K. B. McFarlane, Carpenter focuses not on the wars themselves but the interaction between the court and the provinces, the reign of Henry VI and the role of monarchy in the polity and constitution, and the impact of wars on the nobility, gentry, commoners, and church.
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Goodman, Anthony. The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–97. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
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An immensely detailed and researched work that illuminates the interplay of politics and military affairs, as well as the logistics of the wars. Though weaker on the political dimension of the conflict, the military narrative constitutes one of the best overviews of the subject.
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The Tudor Age (1485–1603)
The period of Tudor rule has generated some of the most intense debates in English historiography, which continue unabated through the present. The nature of the Tudor monarchy (see The Tudor Monarchy), as well as 16th-century Parliaments, was the traditional purview of historians, though visual iconography, the court, and other accoutrements of power-projection have been emphasized in recent decades. In addition, the role of Tudor political culture and the more informal networks of power and patronage have complicated previous institutional and administrative treatments of governance. Studies of localities, which thrived in the 1970s and 1980s, continue to be valuable, while “popular” resistances in the form of riots or the Pilgrimage of Grace remain debated subjects. In the realm of foreign policy, one of the richest developments has centered on the nature of the colonization enterprise in Ireland, while the origins of empire, located in this period, have also received extensive coverage. The Reformation, and developments in English Catholicism, form a large and significant topic for the Tudor Age (see the separate entry on The English Reformation).
THE TUDOR MONARCHY
One of the most notable (and interdisciplinary) recent developments in studies of the Tudor monarchy is the attention paid to projections of kingship and power through the use of iconography, spectacle, and display. Image-making, in other words, was key to at least two of the Tudors, particularly as it served as a means and expression of political power and governance. Guy 1997 is particularly important in this regard, while Rex 2002 and Williams 1995 provide excellent overviews of the Tudor monarchs across the century.
Guy, John ed. The Tudor Monarchy. London: Arnold, 1997.
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A collection of essays by different authors, some previously published, and grouped under the themes of “Renaissance Monarchy,” “Personalities and Politics,” and “Politics and Government.” Specific themes pursued include image-making and the monarchy, royal symbolism and the court, the relationship of the monarch and his counselors, the reputation of William Cecil, favorites at Elizabeth’s court, and the role of parliament during the later reigns.
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Rex, Richard. The Tudors. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2002.
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A short and readable survey of the Tudors utilizing the most recent scholarship.
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Williams, Penry. The Later Tudors: England 1547–1603. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
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A straightforward survey of the Tudor reigns from Edward VI on, with a good incorporation of the larger British context, including Ireland. Recent scholarship and topics such as art and culture are also integrated into the narrative.
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TUDOR POLITICAL CULTURE
Studies that center on the idea of “political culture,” which encompasses a wider field of action than administrative and formal institutional structures alone, has enlivened the field of Tudor politics, bringing in the importance of patronage, social relations, the localities, and other manifestations of influence. In addition, the dynamic political processes behind Tudor governance have also been emphasized to rich effect and include explorations of political language, literature, and iconography. Newer treatments of Wolsey by Gwyn 1990 and Cecil by Alford 2008 have reassessed these figures and their place in Tudor politics and religion, while Collinson 1994 and the response in McDiarmid 2007 advance new claims regarding republican sentiment under Elizabeth. Hoak 1995 is important in reflecting the turn toward “political culture,” while Williams 1979 remains a significant study of the workings of government under the Tudors.
Alford, Stephen. Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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An important study of Cecil that revises the standard picture of him as a faithful servant-bureaucrat and argues instead for him as man with a political vision for Britain, as well as a deep ability to approach and actively shape politics practically and ideologically.
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Collinson, Patrick. “The Monarchical Republic.” In Elizabethan Essays. Edited by Patrick Collinson. London: Hambledon, 1994.
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Proposes the important and much-commented-upon thesis that Elizabethan England was “a republic that also happened to be a monarchy,” with councilors acting against the queen’s wishes and maintaining their own non-monarchical ideological stances as they considered themselves citizens in a shared commonwealth.
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Gwyn, Peter. The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990.
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A radical reinterpretation of the cardinal-minister that uses Wolsey’s rise and fall to argue, among other things, against faction in Tudor politics; Wolsey is instead presented as essentially conciliar in spirit, “first among equals,” and a figure who had no monopoly over matters of privilege or patronage.
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Hoak, Dale, ed. Tudor Political Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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Twelve scholars contribute essays to this volume, examining the “codes of conduct, formal or informal” that governed political society in Tudor times. Topics include the theory of sovereignty, Shakespeare, ideas of empire, the role of counsel, and the royal image.
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McDiarmid, John F., ed. The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
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A rich collection of essays by leading scholars that engages with Collinson’s famous thesis and extends it across other reigns before and after Elizabeth. Particularly important are essays by Quentin Skinner and Anne McLaren (on the early Stuarts) as well as by Peter Lake and Johann Somerville, who caution against applying republicanism too broadly across groups and individuals in the Elizabethan period.
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Williams, Penry. The Tudor Regime. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.
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A detailed exploration of the Tudor workings of government, including parliament, particularly in the relationship between rulers and ruled, or between the government’s constitutional, political, financial, and social policies and communities across England.
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TUDOR GOVERNANCE
The study of Tudor governance was dominated throughout the 20th century by G. R. Elton, who remains essential for any student examining the institutional workings of the government—including the crown, the council, the court, and parliament—of the period. Elton, however, tended to emphasize not only the role of Thomas Cromwell, but the purely administrative, institutional, and “revolutionary” aspects of governance, such as parliament, though his student, David Starkey, made significant contributions to the more informal (as well as formal) role of the court in Tudor politics. These views are best represented in Elton 1953 and Elton 1973; Elton’s critics, however, have begun to emphasize the continued importance of interpersonal relationships and networks, and what John Guy has called the “abnormal” as well as “normal” activities of institutions—views evident inColeman and Starkey 1986. For an overview of high politics, see Bernard 2000 and the collection of essays in Cross, et al. 1988.
Bernard, G. W. Power and Politics in Tudor England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.
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A collection of essays dealing with high politics during the 16th century, with themes focusing on the continued power of the nobility, the insistence on Henry VIII as an effective and active leader, and policymaker, and the ineffectiveness of the idea of faction and conflict to explain political change.
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Coleman, Christopher, and David Starkey, eds. Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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An outstanding reconsideration by leading scholars of G. R. Elton’s famous thesis regarding the centrality of Thomas Cromwell in Tudor parliamentary transformation and revolution in government. Critiques of Elton, which also stress continuity rather than revolution, are approached through analysis of such subjects as the privy council as well as Parliament itself.
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Cross, Clare, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick, eds. Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Retirement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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Thirteen contributors make up this collection of essays that cover subjects as diverse as bondsmen under the Tudors, the royal affinity and the subsidy bill, Protestants in London, the “union” of Wales and England, and the conquest of Ireland.
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Elton, G. R. The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953.
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The seminal work of Tudor administrative history, arguing for a “revolution” in administrative government during the 1530s and extending beyond, initiated under the tutelage of Thomas Cromwell and resulting in the creation of a quasi-modern bureaucratic national state.
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Elton, G. R. Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
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The classic account that emphasizes the centrality of Thomas Cromwell as an agent and patron of reform in the intellectual, political, and religious sphere of the 1530s. The role played by Cromwell in transforming ecclesiastical policy, particularly regarding the law and the courts, and his transformation of secular law in general, are given special treatment.
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COURT AND PARLIAMENTS, 1500–1600
The nature of Tudor Parliaments has constituted one of the most heated debates in all of English historiography. Departing from the traditional view in which Parliament emerged in the later century as an oppositional body, revisionists beginning with Geoffrey Elton, and reflected in Elton 1986, came to view the institution as a compliant partner to the crown, with no “Puritan opposition” existing. Since then, works from historians such as Roskell 1970, Graves 1985, and Loach 1991 have amended such views to include some degree of parliamentary opposition or conflict within its larger cooperative function as not a political so much as legislative and taxing body. For a good general overview of Parliament, including the Lords as well as the Commons, see Russell 1971. Recently labeled the “New Tudor political history,” the study of the political networks of the court has also received scrutiny after decades of being relegated, by Elton and others, to the sphere of a “private” and by implication, nongovernmental, entity. However, politics, as Natalie Mears has put it, was “less about institutions... than about interactions between those institutions, people and ideas.” If politics is as much about social networks and clienteles as the workings of parliament, for example, then the court thus becomes central to the process of governance—a point made clear in Adams 2002 as well as Loades 1987 and Starkey 1991.
Adams, Simon. Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002.
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A collection of sixteen important essays (particularly “Eliza Enthroned? The Court and Its Politics”) that incisively examines the court and council of Elizabeth and its supposed factions (which Adams argues against, at least before Essex), as well as the role of patronage, Parliament, nobility, and the Earl of Leicester.
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Elton, G. R. The Parliament of England, 1559–1581. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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A highly detailed study of the legislative process and a thorough refutation of Neale, in its revisionist assertion that parliament under Elizabeth, while not without disagreements, was on the whole a dutiful and cooperative organ of government, fulfilling its legislative functions rather than serving as an oppositional constitutional force.
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Graves, M. A. R. The Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords, and Commons, 1485–1603. London: Longman, 1985.
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A revisionist account that stresses the cooperative nature of the Parliaments during the Tudor reigns, with less focus on the Commons and more on the business and procedure of both houses, and their function in matters of taxation and passing statutes.
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Loach, Jennifer. Parliament under the Tudors. Oxford: The Clarendon, 1991.
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A qualified revisionist account of Parliament under the Tudors, clearly explaining the institution’s function and procedure and examining the Lords as well as the Commons. Arguing for its consensual as well as essentially legislative function, Loach nevertheless describes parliament as attempting to assert itself against the control of the monarchy. Particularly strong on parliaments under Edward and Mary.
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Loades, David. The Tudor Court. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987.
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A useful synthesis that examines all aspects of the Tudor court as a vital institution and political force, particularly as it could unite the private and the public, the political and the domestic, patronage and culture, stagecraft and quotidian power struggles.
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Roskell, J. S. “Perspectives in English Parliamentary History.” In Historical Studies of the English Parliament. Vol. 2, 1399–1603. Edited by E. B. Fryde and Edward Miller, 296–323. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
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An important article that argues against the notion of Neale’s and Elton’s that Tudor parliaments were somehow “modern,” especially since, according to Roskell, they would not become indispensable to the governance of England until the 1690s. Instead, continuities with Parliaments of the Middle Ages distinguished the Tudor institution more than any claim to newness.
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Russell, Conrad. The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
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A well-written work intended for the student and specialist alike, this study extends across key moments in constitutional history, stating the reasons for Parliament’s transformation over time. The book is particularly strong in its introductory comments and overviews, though also deft in its analysis of the Reformation and other Tudor Parliaments, as well as Russell’s own specialty of the 17th century.
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Starkey, David. “Court, Council, and Nobility in Tudor England.” In Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c.1450–1650. Edited by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Burke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
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A good assessment of the Tudor court, arguing that 1540 constituted a turning point in which “‘Councillors attendant on the king turned into an institutional board.’ Collegiate, conciliar rule was now a reality” (p. 198).
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LOCAL AND URBAN GOVERNMENT
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a surge in studies of localities, focusing on the manner in which they interacted with the center, and functioned within the framework of their own domains. Though the field is not perhaps as vibrant as it once was, and religion and the Reformation have now overshadowed the political and social aspects of these communities, the following works remain important in shifting the focus from the high politics of Whitehall and Westminster to the workings of regional centers. Clark and Slack 1976 examines change across three centuries, while the essays inClark 2000 focuses on area studies, including urban centers, and Spufford 1974 is a classic work on developments in village life.
Clark, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. 2, 1540–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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A huge volume of twenty-five essays divided into “area surveys” across England, and “urban themes and types” throughout the centuries. Among the topics explored are urban politics and government, continuity and change in religion, the economy of London, the larger provincial towns, the British waterborne trade, urban declines and revivals, and population developments. Scotland and Wales are also included.
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Clark, Peter, and Paul Slack, eds. English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700. London: Oxford University Press, 1976.
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An excellent and dense survey that tracks the development of English towns across three centuries of change, distinguishing between country towns and provincial capitals and delineating the effects of population growth, flows of immigrants from the countryside, the movement of industrial centers to the rural areas, and cultural and social influence from the court.
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Spufford, Margaret. Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
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An exemplary comparative study of villages over the course of two centuries, focusing on land distribution, husbandry, taxation, parish and manor life and social-structural change. Especially impressive in its use of source materials, including wills, inventories, and manorial surveys.
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TUDOR REBELLIONS AND RIOTS
Though the emphasis on order and disorder in Tudor and Stuart England is examined in Crime and Punishment, Order and Disorder, Fletcher 2009 is a seminal account of general resistance movements against the Tudors, while Manning 1988 focuses on protests from the village. Slack 1984 and Wood 2002 also provide good overviews of the rebellions and resistances that tracked the Tudors as they attempted to impose religion, enclosure, and taxation policies on the realm, with Slack emphasizing recent socio-anthropological approaches and Wood representing an excellent recent synthesis. Loades 1992 also treats the upheavals of the mid-Tudor years, though he argues that during this era the government was stable enough to withstand such conflicts.
Fletcher, Anthony. Tudor Rebellions. 5th ed. London: Longman, 2009.
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A classic account of the resistances and rebellions against Tudor policies over the course of the century, including grievances against extraordinary taxation, religion (the Pilgrimage of Grace), enclosures (Kett’s rebellion), the marriage of Mary to Philip, and northern attempts to counter the prerogatives of London.
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Loades, David M. The Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1545–1565. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
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A good overview of the crises that plagued the years between 1545 and 1565, particularly concerning economic problems, the question of the royal succession after Elizabeth, and the Church settlement. Loades, however, argues for an essential stability in government that marked even Mary’s years.
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Manning, Roger B. Village Revolts: Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
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Though this work extends into the 17th century, it is an excellent account of the popular protests that erupted during the Tudor reigns, particularly with regard to the enclosure riots and other land use issues that were dominant concerns in the discontent.
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Slack, Paul, ed. Rebellion, Popular Protest, and the Social Order in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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Utilizing sociological and anthropological approaches, the essays in this collection attempt to understand the dynamics of disorder primarily from the point of view of the protesters, utilizing local studies and particular incidents. Disorders that are examined include the Pilgrimage of Grace and Kett’s Rebellion, as well as general public disturbances and upheavals by adolescents.
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Wood, Andy. Riot, Rebellion, and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.
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A good recent synthesis that fuses social and political history as well as theory to understand the workings of popular politics across Tudor and Stuart England. The rebellions of 1549 are examined, particularly as they “represented the largest and most sustained popular challenge to the authority of the English gentry and nobility during the early modern period”; other outbreaks, and popular politics in general, are also explored at length.
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The Pilgrimage of Grace
Considered the “greatest” of the Tudor rebellions, the Pilgrimage of Grace continues to elicit debate among historians who question whether it was the result of strained economic conditions in the north, religious in its attempt to hold onto the old faith, a reaction to Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, reflective of indigenous fissures in the north, genuinely popular in nature, or aided and manipulated by the nobility and gentry. Dodds 1971 provides the classic treatment, which has been updated by Bush 1996 and Hoyle 2001.
Bush, Michael. The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996.
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A very good attempt to revise (though not replace) the work of the Dodds in examining the creation of rebel forces across the north, and in doing so to understand the origins and leadership, as well as the goals, of the conflict
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Dodds, Madeline Hope. The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538. 2 vols. London: F. Cass, 1971.
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Considered the classic account of the uprising, this massive two-volume work is drawn from the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and proceeds from the political background through to the families involved and the rising itself.
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Hoyle, R. W. The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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A substantial narrative of the events, and particularly effective in its analysis of northern society. For Hoyle, the Pilgrimage was a series of revolts of varying social composition and motivation, driven by regional and economic difference. The best recent study, incorporating the latest scholarship.
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FOREIGN POLICY
Historians have long considered Tudor foreign policy a central issue, not only in the maintenance of security in the realm but also in establishing the legitimacy of the dynasty from Henry VII onward. Exploration can be placed within a foreign policy context, for it promised to satisfy the need for revenue so important to the crown. Included among the more fruitful examinations regarding Tudor foreign policy is the debate over the Spanish Armada, considered to be a Spanish failure more than an English success; see Fernandez-Armesto 1988 and Mattingly 2005. In addition, foreign policy within a “British” context, including the question of Ireland (see Tudor Ireland) is examined in Doran and Richardson 2005, while Elizabethan foreign policy receives detailed treatment in MacCaffrey 1992 and Wernham 1980. For a more general overview, see Doran and Richardson 2005.
Doran, Susan, and Glenn Richardson, eds. Tudor England and its Neighbours. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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A good introduction to Tudor foreign policy across the 16th century, in a series of essays written by established scholars. Specific cases are examined in depth, as are larger diplomatic dealings between England and Spain as well as France and the Schmalkaldic League.
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Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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A richly detailed work, arguing against the historical verdict that the English “won” the Armada battle, since the Spanish lost “only in a heavily qualified sense.” The reputation of the Duke of Medina Sidonia is rehabilitated here, and the Spanish ships defended in spite of their deficiencies; while English ships for their part were undoubtedly excellent, the accompanying strategy and organization left something to be desired.
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MacCaffrey, W. T. Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
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The last of MacCaffrey’s massive trilogy, this work focuses on the later wars with Spain as well as Ireland, attuning the reader to the intricacies of Elizabethan diplomatic relations on the continent especially, as well as financial policies and internal disputes among policy makers and commanders.
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Mattingly, Garrett. The Armada. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005.
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The classic work on the Armada, and a well-written and well-documented narrative recounting the events of 1588. Particularly informative in balancing the Spanish and English perspectives, and in recounting the reception of the battle among both publics. Mattingly also argues against the position that the Armada led to an “optimistic” spirit in England; nor was the battle entirely decisive, as it did not end the war between England and Spain, for example.
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Wernham, R. B. The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
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Based on a series of lectures, this short volume examines the origins and development of Elizabeth’s foreign policy, arguing in favor of its coherence, even if based on changing circumstance. As in his After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the struggle for Western Europe, 1588-1595 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Wernham also argues for a greater consistency in foreign policy than traditionally believed.
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EXPLORATION AND “EMPIRE”
Contrary to older triumphalist accounts, the exploration enterprise was not necessarily a success, asAndrews 1985 argues; nor was it undertaken without a great deal of “negotiation,” according toMancke 2002. The portrait in Williamson 2007 of exploration as a purposeful and focused mission has thus been questioned in recent decades. In addition to general studies of exploration, recent contributions on the ideology of empire—influenced by a larger interest in empire and its meanings in a later period—contribute to a deeper understanding of the motives behind the expansion of England into its peripheries and beyond. For recent treatments, see Andrews 1985, which argues for the limited success of the overseas enterprise, and Armitage 2004, which brings in a useful analysis of the wider ideological and political influences at work. Meanwhile, Quinn 1973 remains important for its broader narrative of exploration in early modern England.
Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
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An ambitious work by one of the leading scholars of early modern English expansion, Andrews’s study is important for recasting the nature of the exploration enterprise, especially in arguing that royal interest in such enterprises was limited, and overseas efforts were thus relatively modest in their success.
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Armitage, David. “The Elizabethan Idea of Empire.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 14 (2004): 269–277.
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An authoritative account of the Tudor idea of empire which was a “product and extension of state formation,” particularly over Scotland and Ireland, and one that was essentially “derivative” in its borrowings from contemporary continental and classical discourses.
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Mancke, Elizabeth. “Negotiating and Empire: Britain and Its Overseas Peripheries, c.1550–1780.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1550–1820. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, 235–265. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Though this essay extends well into the 18th century, it nevertheless provides a valuable interpretation of empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, which came about through a process of “negotiating” with rival empires and competing internal interests, and in delineating relations between peripheries and authorities at the metropolitan center.
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Quinn, David Beers. England and the Discovery of America. New York: Knopf, 1973.
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A collection of essays that brings together some of the most important pieces written by the premier historian of exploration, as it examines the shift in the enterprise from one of being narrowly aimed at the discovery of fisheries or routes to the east, to the undertaking, during Elizabeth’s reign, of colonization by military adventurers, religious dissidents, or profit-seekers.
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Williamson, James. The Age of Drake. Cranbury, NJ: Scholars Bookshelf, 2007.
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A traditional and classic account of the exploration enterprise, focusing on Hawkins’s building of the fleet and the voyages that resulted. Valuable for its placing the enterprise within a larger political and diplomatic history, as well as its command of naval detail.
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Tudor Ireland
The subject of Tudor Ireland has been one of the most vibrant fields in the last two decades, with literary scholarship also providing significant understanding of a colonized society straining under 16th-century English centralization. For Ellis 1985, the question of ruling Ireland was an administrative problem, whereas Canny 1976 describes the more overtly colonizing aspects, andBrady and Gillespie 1986 discusses the impact of English religious and political impositions. Lennon 2005 also explores the Irish response to the changes, with Morgan 2004 providing a sharp analysis of the general “misgovernance” of Elizabethan rule. In the latter works especially, questions are raised concerning why Ireland was so difficult for the Tudors to rule, despite their renewed centralizing efforts and increasingly harsh political and military measures.
Brady, Ciaran and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986.
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A significant collection of the best scholarship on Ireland up to 1986, with the Tudor contributions relating to England’s governance and reformation impositions, as well as the Gaelic aspects of the insurrections and the state of Irish towns during the period. Brady’s article “Court, Castle and Country: The Framework of Government in Tudor Ireland,” is especially illuminating.
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Canny, Nicholas P. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976.
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An earlier contribution to the now-weighty field of Elizabeth and Ireland by one of the leading scholars of the subject. Canny describes the changing policies and attitudes toward the Irish, beginning with the appointment of Henry Sidney in 1565, discussing not only the intricacies of financial and other policies but also the increasing polemical barbarization of the Irish that would color English attitudes from then on.
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Ellis, Steven. Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community, and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603. London: Longman, 1985.
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A detailed and somewhat controversial survey of Ireland under the Tudors, through the prism of the English state. Primarily an administrative problem—at least according to Ellis—the governance of Ireland emerged during Elizabeth’s reign as a transitional entity balanced between Tudor general expansion and a more aggressive colonial policy in the 1590s.
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Lennon, Colm. Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest. Dublin: Gil and Macmillan, 2005.
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An important survey of Ireland under the Tudors, with particularly strong chapters on town and country, society and culture in Gaelic Ireland, the fall of the Kildare ascendancy, and the impact of the Reformation. Emphasized in the second part of the book are Ireland’s responses to English centralization, as well as the introduction of plantation schemes.
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Morgan, Hiram. “‘Never Any Realm Worse Governed’: Queen Elizabeth and Ireland.”Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 14 (2004): 295–308.
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According to Morgan, Elizabeth’s intentions toward Ireland led to disastrous consequences and were an egregious example of misgovernance. Indeed, Ireland was not about aspirations for empire, nor did Elizabeth “complete” the conquest begun with the Normans; instead, she appointed a number of secretaries whose efforts proved “ruinous” and resulted in resistance, bloody wars, and the “sullen and forced obedience” at the end of her reign.
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The Early Stuart Age (1603–1642)
The leading debates regarding the early years of James I tend to focus on the relationship between the church and the state, and specifically the nature of the church itself and the debates that occurred between Puritans—a problematic term—and the group known as “Arminians.” James himself has been recast in a more favorable light, and has also been placed within a larger context as both a Scottish and English king. Political ideas in general, traditionally treated (or reduced) to a debate between divine right “absolutism” and constitutionalism, have also been reconsidered and heavily questioned. The most contentious subject of the period, however, remains the nature of the early Stuart Parliaments, particularly as they contributed to or had little to do with the civil wars that erupted in the 1640s. The events of this age nevertheless did culminate in the tumultuous period of the mid-century.
POLITICAL IDEAS
Whether Parliament was dominated by consensus or oppositional politics, or whether absolutism was really such a force against constitutionalism—as has been traditionally taught in basic courses—scholars agree that political ideas circulated richly in early Stuart England. Burgess 1996 andBurgess 1993, as well as Cromartie 2006, are some of the best recent works to explore the field of political ideas, though the classic works of Figgis 1965 and especially Pocock 1987 still remain essential for any student of the period. For good overviews of the period and its political ideas, seeHirst 1986 and Phillipson and Skinner 1993.
Burgess, Glenn. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
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Engaging in (and occasionally arguing against) the work of J. A. Pocock, Burgess examines the ancient constitution as well as general political thought, focusing on the languages of political discourse and conceptualization, even if they did not necessarily dissent from each other, at least in James’s reign.
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Burgess, Glenn. Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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An excellent study that convincingly argues against the Whiggish notion of absolutist theory holding any true significance in early Stuart political thought. In addition, Burgess emphasizes ideological consent over conflict in early Stuart England.
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Cromartie, Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642. Ideas in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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A fine overview intended for a more specialist reader concerning constitutionalist ideas in England since the 15th century, with extensive discussion of the political theories behind the mid-century conflict. Incisive readings of major and minor political and legal thinkers, and an excellent bibliography.
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Figgis, J. N. The Divine Right of Kings. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
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A classic text first published in 1896. Examines the theory in terms of its long medieval roots and how it was used to accommodate to the exigencies of the day and contributed to Western political theory as a whole.
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Hirst, Derek. Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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An effective overview that incorporates newer approaches to the developments of the Stuart reigns through the interregnum, with particularly strong chapters on the mid-century conflict’s effects on average men and women as well as the Cromwellian government, including Richard Cromwell’s brief tenure.
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Phillipson, Nicholas, and Quentin Skinner. Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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Sixteen contributions that discuss in various ways what Pocock, in a concluding essay, calls “the sovereignty of the English state and its problems.” Aspects of political thought in the civil war years and during the Glorious Revolution are examined, as is the work of Hobbes and Harrington.
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Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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A seminal and learned work that traces the long-term influence of the Common Law and legal thinking in English political thought, including the justification of the ancient constitution in the service of revolutionary or civil war England
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Sommerville, J. P. Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1999.
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An excellent survey that argues for the importance of ideological principles in early Stuart England, as evidenced not in political philosophy or parliamentary debate but through pamphlets, sermons, and treatises. Topics include the divine right of kings, the role of consensual government, and the idea of the ancient constitution, as well the application of such notions in specific cases of the age.
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JAMES VI AND I: KINGSHIP AND POLITICAL CULTURE
Once considered lazy and indolent, if politically wily in moments, James has recently been placed in a positive light through his conciliatory efforts or achievements in religion, diplomacy, and politics. In an important article, Wormald 1978 described how the prejudice was inherited from contemporary English pamphlets, and called for such a reassessment. Meanwhile, James’s dual role as king of England and Scotland has been emphasized with the recent turn in British history, and is reflected inLee 1990 and Croft 2003. As with the Tudors, the court under James and Charles has recently received serious consideration as it reflected a more dynamic political process at work in terms of patronage, cultural (and political) expression, and iconography. Peck 1991 especially emphasizes the difference between the court of James and his Tudor predecessors in terms of changing political ideas, notions of honor, and new continental and French influences. For a good and relatively recent study of the Duke of Buckingham, a key figure at court, see Lockyer 1981.
Croft, Pauline. King James. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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A short and more favorable reevaluation of the first Stuart king of England, focusing primarily on his English kingship as well as his theory of divine right, and his religious beliefs and ecclesiastical policies.
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Lee, Maurice. Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
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A good reassessment of James the man and king, with a detailed examination of his intellectual formation, early navigation of Scottish politics (including the nobility), his English career, and his essential shrewdness as a politician. Though he did not succeed in imposing discipline on the English court, Lee writes, he was effective in achieving religious harmony and diplomatic peace.
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Lockyer, Roger. The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628. London: Longman, 1981.
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A detailed narrative and political biography based on international archival research and presenting Buckingham’s rise to power from his origins in provincial society and his evolution into what Locker argues was accomplished statesmanship, particularly from 1625 to 1628.
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Peck, Linda Levy, ed. The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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A significant compilation of articles exploring the court’s Scottish and continental influences, its political thought and language, intellectual milieu, and patronage practices. James’s own political beliefs are also examined, as is the general role of culture and cultural dissemination.
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Wormald, Jenny. “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?” History 68 (1978): 187–209.
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A seminal article that questions the different perceptions of the English and Scottish toward the same monarch. Deconstructs the xenophobic English polemics against the king that would shape later perceptions of historians and calls for an overhaul of the king’s legacy to uncover the authentic ruler under the layers of false accretions.
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THE EARLY STUART CHURCH AND THE EPISCOPATE
The nature of the early Stuart church has received some of the most intense scrutiny in the past decades, particularly in terms of the state of its internal divisions (if there were in fact divisions, at least theologically). The nature of the “Calvinist consensus” and the religious concord (or discord) have been questioned by Peter Lake and others, and they continue to provoke debate, particularly as they foreshadow (or not) the religious hostilities of the 1630s. Fincham 1990 as well as Cust and Hughes 1989 offer valuable examinations of the church (and its relationship to politics), withPatterson 1998 providing a new reading of the king’s own intentions in uniting Christiandom within the kingdom and the west (and east) generally.
Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642. London: Longman, 1989.
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A critique of the revisionist position asserting political consensus in early Stuart England, this collection of essays by leading historians brings a more subtle reading of conflict to such areas as local responses to political questions of the day, notions of royal power and property, anti-popery and ceremonialism, and ideologies of the “Country.”
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Fincham, Kenneth. Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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A revisionist account of the Jacobean bishops and the important and active role they played in national and local politics and society. Their preaching duties and other responsibilities are also examined in depth.
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Patterson, W. B. King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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A well-researched and highly interesting study of a king who, according to the author, “saw religious reconciliation”—particularly across Christendom—as the key to a stable and peaceful Christendom, at a time when “religious disputes exacerbated the conflict among states.”
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Puritanism and Arminianism
The famous thesis of Tyacke 1987—that the Arminianism of Archbishop William Laud drove the Calvinists into opposition, leading to civil war—gave much mileage to historians who proceeded to debate him in the decades to come. For scholars such as Davies (Davies 1992), Laud was even a moderate, while White (White 1992) argues that “Arminian” was simply a bogeyman term. Lake and Questier 2000 provides a good overview of the different debates. In addition to these works, Como 2004 promises to open the field further in the understanding of the Puritan underground and its influence on the radicalism of the later decades.
Como, David. Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
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An outstanding recent account of the Puritan movement before the war, deftly connecting texts written before and after 1640 to explore the radical origins of the mid-century antinomians.
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Davies, Julian. The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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A challenge to Tyacke’s thesis of Arminianism, denying its centrality and arguing in favor of Laud’s moderation. For Davies, the king rather than Laud was behind the undoubted innovations of ceremony, leading to religious war.
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Lake, Peter, and Michael Questier, eds. Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2000.
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An influential group of essays that seeks a new paradigm in questioning or complicating distinctions between orthodoxy, conformity, and Roman Catholicism in English religion, with essays by Nicholas Tyacke on anti-Calvinism and Lancelot Andrewes, David Como on Puritanism, Kenneth Fincham on Laudian discipline, and Alexandra Walsham on the career of Thomas Bell and his advocacy of “qualified conformism.”
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Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
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A seminal, influential, and much-debated work that essentially argues in favor of the Church of England’s Calvinist nature, until Charles and Laud imposed their Arminianism on it during the 1620s and 1630s, driving the Calvinists to an oppositional stance and thus contributing to the Civil War. The doctrines of predestination and grace, particularly between Arminians and Puritans, are especially targeted as essential in a theological divergence that led to conflict.
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White, Peter. Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Engages against the revisionist camp of Tyacke to argue against Charles’s commitment to Arminianism, with even Laud defending Calvinism (though there was no “Calvinist consensus” in the English church). In this sense, White argues, Arminianism was a “bugbear” utilized for polemical purposes, just as the doctrine of predestination has been overemphasized by historians.
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POLITICS AND PARLIAMENT, 1603–1640
The Stuart Parliaments up to 1640 have brought on some of the most heated debates in all of English historiography, primarily because they were long seen as contributing to the civil wars—or so Wallace Notestein (Notestein 1924–1925) once argued, in describing an increasingly oppositional House of Commons in these years. Beginning in the 1970s, Conrad Russell (Russell 1979) led the attack among the revisionists in arguing for a general consensus in Parliament, or at least no dialectical division between armed camps; the civil wars, he claimed, were not the result of a long-term constitutional grievance but were instead the product of short-term causes and highly contingent mistakes made on the part of Charles—perhaps due to the insoluble problem in managing a British rather than English kingdom. Though he did not eschew long-term causes entirely, Russell nevertheless provided an entirely new narrative for the civil war—one based in part on a detailed analysis of parliaments in the earlier decades. Students and specialists should also consult Cust 1987 for an important episode in the parliamentary conflict, Kishlansky 1986 for a detailed examination of parliamentary elections, and Hexter 1941 for treatment of a major figure of the institution. Smith 1999 provides a more recent overview.
Cust, Richard. The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
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Long considered an important factor in bringing on the conflict of the civil war, the Forced Loan is given a reassessment in this volume, with the conclusion that it was indeed perceived as more than “just another disagreement.” Detailed examinations of the reactions in the localities to the collection of the loan, as well as the reasons behind its ultimate failure, constitute a particular strength of this excellent book.
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Hexter, J. H. The Reign of King Pym. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941.
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A classic traditionalist account that traces the emergence of a middle group in the Commons. It portrays Pym as a practical and highly skilled figure, a “political tactician, a political engineer,” who “somehow or other... kept things going” in a volatile time, particularly after the outbreak of war (p. 200).
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Kishlansky, Mark A. Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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An excellent study of how members of Parliament were “selected” rather than “elected,” based upon social choices and honor, as they proceeded to the institution with little dissent. Only in the middle years of the century did elections or “participatory democracy” emerge, with men competing electorally and opposing each other on political issues. The analysis continues through the Restoration era.
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Notestein, Wallace. “The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons.” Proceedings of the British Academy 11 (1924–1925): 125–175.
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An older representative account that characterizes parliamentary history as consisting of conflict between Crown and Commons, with the Commons expressing a growing procedural confidence that would by implication lead to war.
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Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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The classic and pivotal revision of the arguments of S. R. Gardiner, Wallace Notestein and others concerning the “winning of the initiative” of parliament, as well as notions concerning court and country and the long-term political effects of the civil war.
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Smith, David L. The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689. London: Arnold, 1999.
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Addresses the “major gap” in the study of Parliaments by focusing on the reasons behind their pivotal nature and transformation during the century. The House of Lords, as well as the conflicts and factions that did arise in the 1620s, are given attention, though a revisionist stress on continuity and contingency is also emphasized.
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CHARLES I AND THE PERSONAL RULE
Sharpe 1992, the now-classic work on the personal rule, is standard for any examination of this time, though scholars have taken issue with its generally favorable treatment of the king’s prerogative experiment. As for Charles himself, his elusive and opaque character (at least until the Eikon Basilike was published) continues to inspire conflicting views. Cust 2007 and Aylmer 1974 provide a picture of the larger political life, including the workings of government. Merritt 1996 and Wedgwood 2001 should also be consulted for excellent treatments of the Earl of Strafford, a key figure during the period.
Aylmer, G. E. The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
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A classic work that describes the workings and personnel of Charles’s government throughout his reign, including the king’s servants, his household, and the methods of appointment and security of tenure of his personnel.
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Cust, Richard. Charles I: A Political Life. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007.
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A shrewd, insightful, and somewhat critical recent assessment of Charles, with a good analysis of the political issues of the 1620s, the Personal Rule from 1629 to 1640, the king’s management of Scotland and Ireland, and his role during the civil war years.
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Merritt, J. F., ed. The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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An instructive and important group of essays by leading historians that examines Wentworth’s career and the different “identities” he assumed, as well as the larger political culture of the 1620s and 1630s. Essays by Jane Ohlmeyer and Nicholas Canny on Ireland and a historiographic review by Peter Lake are particularly noteworthy.
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Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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A now-classic study of Charles’s personal rule of 1629–1640, including enlightening discussions of his fiscal and ecclesiastical policies, his court, and diplomacy. Charles is presented in a favorable light, while the work as a whole is revisionist in underplaying any long-term conflicts, at least before 1637, that might have contributed to the civil war.
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Wedgwood, C. V. Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Revaluation. New York: Phoenix, 2001.
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A revision of Wedgwood’s own 1935 appraisal of Strafford, based upon new research of his papers and focusing more at length on his tenure in Ireland. His early career in the 1620s Parliaments is examined, as are his alliances at court after 1628, but his Irish career, which was “incoherent,” garners the most renewed attention.
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Economic History, 1450–1700
Beginning in the 1980s, the economic history of England in the Tudor and Stuart period benefited from a surge in studies that centered on the demographic, agricultural, and urban history of the period, as well as developments in industry, trade, and governmental policy. Social history and local studies, such as Holderness 1976 and Wrightson 2000, have also contributed to an understanding of the different dimensions of economic change. Chambers 1972 is one of the standard texts, though the consensus today, following Clay 1984 and others, is that the Tudor and Stuart periods were hardly dull moments before the economic revolutions of the 18th century, particularly when industry could also be found earlier on, despite the continued predominance of an agrarian economy.
Chambers, J. D. Population, Economy, and Society in Pre-industrial England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
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Based on a series of lectures, this overview by one of the leading historians of the field explores the economic realities of premodern England, beginning in the Middle Ages. Chambers’s expertise in demographic history merits special treatment, particularly regarding changes in death and birth rates over the centuries.
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Clay, C. G. A. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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An enormous and detailed survey of the economy in Tudor and Stuart England, designed for students but also useful for the specialist. Clay is particularly incisive on the subject of demographic change, commercial activity and overseas expansion, and the impact of the civil wars, in terms of their effect on economic developments.
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Holderness, B. A. Pre-industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750. London: Dent: 1976.
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A general text relating economic and social developments that accounts for major and minor changes in the sectors of agriculture, commerce, and industry, as well as in prices, population changes, consumption, and investment patterns. Provincial culture as well as the wider European context is also examined.
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Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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A well-written and exhaustively researched study that examines economic development and change at a local and household as well as a national and international level, stressing the role of prices and demographics in the 16th and 17th centuries. The economic transformations of the later 17th and 18th centuries are also given extensive treatment.
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POPULATION
Population numbers in premodern England are notoriously difficult to come by, although the classic work of Wrigley and Schofield 1989, based in part on the evidence from parish records, has contributed to a clearer picture of a demographically dramatic age. Other studies, such as Houston 1992, connect population figures to their social and economic contexts, while Slack 1990 debates the impact of the plague and disease on population numbers as a whole.
Houston, R. A. The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1500–1750. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1992.
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A short study that extends across England, Scotland, and Ireland, and explores the relationship between demographics and economic development, fertility and mortality, and the impact of emigration on population figures.
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Slack, Paul. The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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A rich and important social history investigating the bubonic plague in Tudor and Stuart England, with extensive empirical detail exploring the nexus between the biological and the social, disease and public policy, and epidemics and the psychological and religious responses provoked by them.
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Wrigley, E. A., and R. S. Schofield. The Population History of England, 1541–1871. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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A classic work that utilizes parish registers and other sources to estimate demographic behavior and statistics across time. The recent edition assesses the original work and debate upon it.
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Society and Social Change
Tudor and Stuart England experienced a number of economic and demographic changes, though the extent of their impact on society has been open to debate. Studies, however, have examined how social classes coped with these challenges, which could also include religious upheaval. Laslett 2004 is the classic study of society in the premodern world, while Wrightson 1982 provides a more recent and comprehensive treatment; Sharpe 1997 and Coward 1997 track social change as a whole, with the role of ritual in everyday life receiving an excellent treatment by Cressy 1997.
Coward, Barry. Social Change and Continuity: England 1550–1750. London: Longman, 1997.
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A concise introductory survey that follows the changes and continuities in English society over two centuries. Material conditions of life as well as popular belief are discussed; primary source documents and a review of the recent scholarship are also included.
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Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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An outstanding and vividly drawn investigation of the rituals and mental worlds that determined the lives of Tudor and Stuart people, drawing on a huge range of source materials.
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Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost: Further Explained. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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A classic work, focusing on the family, kinship, and community in the preindustrial period. Demography and famine are also explored by this leading member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.
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Sharpe, J. A. Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760. 2d ed. London: Arnold, 1997.
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A useful study that explores the family, community, social hierarchy, and change, as well as the mental and religious world of “real people” in “pre-factory” Tudor and Stuart England. Literacy, popular culture, and economic transformations are also discussed and placed within the large political context.
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Wrightson, Keith. English Society, 1580–1680. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982.
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Though Wrightson takes up his narrative later in Elizabeth’s reign, his work is still important in providing a fine analysis of the structures and hierarchy of English society, as well as kinship, family, paternalism, and neighborliness during the Queen’s rule. The impact of literacy, demographics, and economic transformation is emphasized throughout.
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, ORDER AND DISORDER
The Tudor ideal of social order underwent challenges during times of crisis, which were brought about by economic instability, geographical mobility, religious policies, and other disruptions. But most recent historians, as in Archer 1991, tend to emphasize the maintenance of order and stability, enforced above all by the community itself. The perspective from the ground, or the responses by average men and women to the measures of the authorities, has also received much attention byFletcher 1985, with its emphasis on local society. Brewer 1980 also focuses on popular upheaval as well as official ideology, while Herrup 1987 examines the communities’ role in policing their own. In the area of crime, definitional and methodological problems with the sources abound, but studies likeSharpe 1984 still provide an excellent picture of the criminal world, as well as the punishments and means of enforcement by the authorities.
Archer, Ian. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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Archer examines the important issues of social relations and the maintenance of stability in London, particularly in the troublesome 1590s. Countering other historians in his emphasis on conflict and the tenuousness of stability, Archer describes the ruling elites as fully aware of the tensions they presided over, particularly during times of demographic change, bad harvests, and economic decline.
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Brewer, John, and John Styles, eds. An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980.
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A collection of six essays that explores the attitudes of ordinary men and women toward the law and ideas of governance, with topics that include the food riots of 1629 and debtors in the King’s Bench prisons. The “official ideology” of order as propounded by moralists and political thinkers is also explored at length, although a general picture of conflict is prevalent throughout.
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Fletcher, Anthony, and John Stevenson, eds. Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560552Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important collection of essays based upon studies of local society rather than high politics and focusing primarily on the 17th century. Disorder is extended by authors such as David Underdown to include the realm of gender, while others examine the fenmen and yeomen as well as more generalized popular religion and the role of the language of honor and reputation in preserving order.
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Herrup, Cynthia. The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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A “social history of the criminal process in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (p. 2), this study is an excellent contribution to the field of crime and the law, utilizing a range of archival sources, particularly from (somewhat typical) eastern Sussex. Focus rests primarily on the role of communities and social consensus in enforcing order, standards, and the rule of the law.
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Sharpe, J. A. Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750. London: Longman, 1984.
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Written by the leading historian of early modern criminality, this work is intended as a synthesis and introduction to the subject, utilizing a range of sources. Argues for continuity in the type and prevalence of crime since the early 14th century, although dramatic shifts would occur in the middle of the 17th century.
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THE NOBILITY
Recent assessments of the nobility in England, as in Bernard 1992, stress its continuity, at least in the Tudor age, and downplay the long-accepted notion—reflected in James 1988—of the crown taming these “over-mighty subjects” who were actually, in many estimations, cooperative fixtures in society. The nobility in the 17th century has been treated most famously (and problematically) by Stone 1965, which characterized the nobility as beset by anxiety over social mobility, declining wealth, and prestige—a thesis that many have found to be exaggerated, however.
Bernard, G. W., ed. The Tudor Nobility. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992.
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A series of essays that tends to stress continuity rather than change in the nobility of the Tudor period, and cooperation rather than conflict with the Crown. Subjects explored include various aspects of the relations that existed between individual noblemen, and the class as a whole, with the monarchy.
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James, Mervyn E. Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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An influential though now debated book that argues for the transformation of the 16th-century nobility from “crusading knights to godly magistrates.” Particularly good on the question of honor.
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Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
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A seminal but subsequently much-criticized work on the state of the aristocracy from Elizabeth’s reign through the next century. Stone’s thesis postulates an English peerage whose economic fortune declined significantly in this period—a point that has been disputed, along with his focus on the peerage alone as opposed to the larger landed class.
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THE GENTRY AND THE MIDDLING CLASSES
The famous “storm over the gentry” controversy of the mid–20th century—on display in Stone 1977—has passed, as have the gentry-related speculations contained therein (see The Nobility). But the field of gentry studies continues to be pursued, with Heal and Holmes 1994 being a representative study. Class distinctions or polarizations have themselves been complicated by Barry and Brooks 1994, while other studies of popular religion or the localities continue to include the gentry’s presence in their analysis.
Barry, Jonathan, and Christopher Brooks, eds. The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550–1800. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
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Arguing against simplistic polarizations of class in Tudor and Stuart society, the authors in their introduction initiate a series of essays that explore the identity, professions, attitudes to the civil war, social mobility, urban experience, and local milieu of the “middling” class.
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Heal, Felicity, and Clive Holmes. The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
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An accessible synthesis of original research and existing scholarship on the gentry, examining the group’s activities, politics, education, lineages, religious affiliations, family life, and income. Individual case studies are emphasized throughout, in a work whose theme is the adaptability of the class to social, political, and economic change.
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Stone, Lawrence, ed. Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540–1640. Problems and Perspectives Series. London: Longman, 1977.
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Excerpts of essays centering on the famous “storm over the gentry” debate—a debate now well defunct, though worthy as an artifact in the often fiercely contested historiography of Tudor and Stuart England.
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THE POOR AND POVERTY
Examinations and debates concerning the poor in Tudor and Stuart England, as in Pound 1971, have centered largely on the causes and characteristics of poverty as well as national and local measures to address the problem in the form of poor laws or vagrancy regulations. Beier 1983 is a short survey of the poor laws and poverty, while Hindle 2004 provides a closer look at the impact of poor relief, and Slack 1988 brings in governmental policy as well as the influences that shaped it. As evident in all works, increasing state intervention was prevalent during this period, particularly in the wake of the decline of religious charitable organizations of the pre-Reformation era, but whether policies were enacted out of fear of disorder or compassion is open to question.
Beier, A. L. The Problem of the Poor in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Methuen, 1983.
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A concise account of the poor laws and the problem of poverty in Tudor and Stuart English society, including the presence of “masterless men,” perceptions of poverty in general, and early monastic charity and later state poor relief.
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Hindle, Steve. On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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A rich book that examines the system of English poor relief, incorporating original research as well as recent scholarship. Rural charity and provisions for the poor, according to Hindle, were a measure of larger social and cultural factors, dividing as much as uniting communities; the poor were also not simply passive recipients but active negotiators in the process. Includes an excellent bibliography.
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Pound, John. Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1971.
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Based primarily on evidence from East Anglia, this study examines poverty rates and poor relief across two centuries, clearly elucidating the complexities involved among the poor and delineating the various attempts to redress the problem on a state and private level.
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Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman, 1988.
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A longer-range survey than Slack’s The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), this book provides a relatively concise summary of the issues at work, from the problems in defining poverty to the evolution of governmental policies toward the poor, influenced by humanist and Protestant thought. The larger significance of, and relationship between, public measures and private charity is also explored.
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The Family, Sex, and Marriage
Since the 1970s, and with a reinvigorated approach to social history, the subject of family, sex, andmarriage has been the subject of heightened interest to scholars influenced by feminism as well as anthropological and sociological approaches. England was similar to the Continent in that family structures and marriage patterns were transformed in the 16th and 17th centuries, although certain characteristics, including the class system, the law courts, and religious developments, remained uniquely its own. Women were also subject to the same historical currents that existed on the Continent—currents that largely continued to render them subject. At the same time, certain occupations, as well as the relative freedom, or religious freedom, that many of them claimed during the civil war years, allowed them their own distinct English identity. Scholarship that examines all dimensions of women’s lives, as well as the lives of families, is abundant, and students might benefit as well from a perusal of literary scholarship in terms of the treatment of and writings by women. The following, however, is a representative sample of the more basic yet comprehensive treatments.
COURTSHIP, GENDER, AND FAMILY
Local studies, as well as the approaches offered by anthropology and social history in Macfarlane 1986 and others, have enriched studies of the family in Tudor and Stuart England. In this period of deep familial transformation, Stone 1977 addresses the transformation of the family toward a nuclear entity, while Ingram 1987 and Amussen 1993 discuss the family in terms of society and conflict, including sexual slander cases. The impact of the Reformation on the family has also been addressed by Houlbrooke 1998, which examines how Protestantism affected the rituals and religious beliefs that had bound the family together in previous times. Durston 1989 discusses the equally important changes wrought by the revolution on family structures.
Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
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An exploration of courtship, marriage practices, and sexual slander up through the early 18th century, based on local archival and other research. Argues that the family in the earlier period served as a model of a well-ordered society—a view that would be seriously challenged with the upheavals of the mid–17th century.
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Durston, Christopher. The Family in the English Revolution. New York: Blackwell, 1989.
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An interesting examination of the family (largely gentry) as a social and affective unit, and the impact of the civil war, particularly as it served as a divisive force. The role played by the reformed marriage laws on the institution is also discussed at length, as is the contemporary fear—if not reality—of familial breakdown.
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Houlbrooke, Ralph. Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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A fine exploration of the attitudes, rituals, and religious beliefs that accrued around death, with special attention paid to the impact of the Reformation.
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Ingram, Martin. Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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One of the best overviews that explores gender relations and social conflict and harmony through the prism of the courts. Ingram argues that courts, for all the limitations imposed upon them, functioned as a stabilizing force in settling disputes from within a broader climate of economic and demographic instability.
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Macfarlane, Alan. Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
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An ambitious work that argues for an essential continuity in marriage between the Later Middle Ages up through the 19th century, with the 16th and 17th centuries a part of, rather than disruptive to, this continuum.
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Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.
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An illuminating historical synthesis utilizing anthropology, sociology, and psychology to analyze the transformation of the family in the Tudor and Stuart period from one based on kinship and community to that of autonomy and atomistic individuality, with concomitant changes in courtship and other rituals.
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WOMEN IN TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND
Women in Tudor and Stuart England continue to inspire a number of monographs and works of synthesis for students and specialists alike. Mendelson and Crawford 1998 explores thematic aspects of women’s lives, while Eales 1998 provides a more general introduction, and Prior 1985focuses on the socioeconomic issues at work. Harris 2002 chronicles the lives of aristocratic women, and Fletcher 1995 provides a good study of more abstract notions of gender and their effect on women’s roles in society. England in this period also witnessed a revolutionary war in which women were, however briefly, allowed political and religious channels of expression previously closed to them; Mack 1992 is important in this regard, for exploring the spiritual aims of female prophets, particularly in the Quaker movement. There are a number of excellent volumes on women in Renaissance Europe, but the following is limited to England.
Eales, Jacqueline. Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. New York: Routledge, 1998.
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A useful introduction to the subject, with a good overview of the scholarship, methodology, and sources of evidence in women’s history; the historical background and context of women before the Tudor and Stuart period; ideas about women and their nature; and different facets of women’s lives, including educational opportunities, the family, work, religion, and criminality.
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Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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An ambitious and learned work that examines patriarchy and hierarchical gender assumptions across the centuries, tracing the decline of the one-sex gender system and the rise of a new model based on emerging 17th-century philosophies that ironically upheld women’s “moral, intellectual, and spiritual qualities.” Still, the modern association of masculinity with reason continued to uphold patriarchy, even if, for Fletcher, the Western tradition of misogyny was in decline.
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Harris, Barbara J. English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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A fine study of aristocratic women and their experiences in England from the Yorkist period up to 1550, utilizing family archives, legal records, and a variety of other sources. Women’s family experiences and upbringing, their marriages and motherhoods, their education, and the circles in which they moved, including the court, are analyzed in detail.
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Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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Examining more tha 240 prophecy-speaking women in the 17th century, Mack argues for the centrality of their spiritual (as opposed to their psychological or “hysterical”) motivations and relates them to their larger cultural and social environment. Gender fluidity and the body are examined, with emphasis on Quaker women and their roles as mothers, in addition to the movement’s utilization of feminine imagery.
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Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
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A detailed and definitive study of early modern women’s lives, utilizing a range of original sources, including court records, ballads, and prints. Chapters are topically rather than chronologically divided, examining women’s lifecycles (childhood, youth, old age); marriage, maternity, menopause, and death; political roles; work experiences; and material goods and the household. See also the sourcebook companion volume Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing (London: Routledge, 2000).
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Prior, Mary, ed. Women in English Society, 1500–1800. London: Methuen, 1985.
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A comprehensive collection of essays that focuses on the socioeconomic aspects of women’s lives, utilizing methods of demography and local history. Topics also include the question of marital fertility and birth control, widows and remarriage, working women in Oxford, the wives of Tudor bishops, recusant women, and women writers.
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Mentalities
The history of mentalities is closely related to the history of culture, as well as systems of beliefs and values. Although the term itself does not hold the currency it once did, and the following works are not overtly or formally concerned with the approach in the Annales sense, each touches on aspects of the mental world in the Tudor and Stuart period, particularly as it represented differences with the mentalities of the modern age. In his classic study, Thomas 1997 explores beliefs in magic and witchcraft, while Marshall 2002, Walsham 1999, Macfarlane 1970, and Seaver 1985 address the religious dimensions of belief in matters of life and death, the workings of providence in religious and political worldviews, and the role of the family, respectively. MacDonald 1981 discusses the shift toward a more empirical approach toward the mind, even while beliefs in magic persisted.
MacDonald, Michael. Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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One of the best studies of madness and the emergence of psychology as a practice in Tudor and Stuart England, based on the casebooks of the physician Richard Napier. Broader attitudes and changes in perceptions toward mental abnormality are explored, as well as the holistic nature of science, magic, and religion for treatments. The increasing interest in melancholy is also discussed at length.
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Macfarlane, Alan. The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
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Applying the tools of social anthropology to Josselin’s diary, Macfarlane examines the life of the Puritan clergyman, including his ministry.
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Marshall, Peter. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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An important work that examines the effect of the Reformation on attitudes toward death, including the decline in the belief in purgatory and in the value of prayers for the dying, and the transformation of communal ties and the reciprocal relations between the dead and the living. Ghosts, burial practices, and commemoration are also analyzed as they were transformed by Protestantism.
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Seaver, Paul S. Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
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A reconstruction of the mental and religious world of Nehemiah Wallington, based on his extensive notebooks. Fully convinced of the divine signs around him, but also commenting on the business ethos of the day, Wallington is depicted in his family and domestic setting, and placed within such contemporary upheavals as the civil wars.
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Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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A landmark text and a still-valid explanation of magic and witchcraft in the Tudor and Stuart period, primarily through an anthropological as well as sociological, psychological, and intellectual lens. Thomas uses a huge quantity of source materials, and he is particularly good at dissecting witchcraft accusations on a local level. Thomas also discusses tensions in communities, as well as witchcraft’s decline. Originally published in 1973.
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Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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An important work that traces the concept of providence through Tudor and Stuart England, particularly on the popular level. Examining sermons, broadsides, popular pamphlets, and religious tracts, Walsham describes such topics as the importance of cautionary tales, prodigy stories, and other subgenres, as well as disagreements over the meaning of providence, and providence in a reformation and political context.
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THE WITCH HUNT AND ITS DECLINE
The argument over the causes behind the witch hunt, which began in earnest during the 16th century and declined in the later 17th century, continues to provoke debate, resulting in anthropological, sociological, legal, political, feminist, and psychoanalytical explanations.MacFarlane 1999 provides one of the more seminal and anthropologically oriented histories of witchcraft in the period, as does Sharpe 1997, while Geis and Bunn 1997 offers a case study of one famous trial, and Gaskill 2000 approaches his subject through the history of mentalities. A number of excellent studies exist in general on witchcraft across all of Europe, but the following list is limited to England.
Gaskill, Malcolm. Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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A dense and well-researched study of crime—specifically, witchcraft, coining, and murder—and the “changing mental world” that shaped it across three centuries. Extensive incorporation of the theoretical literature and the problems inherent in treating crime as a subject of historical analysis.
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Geis, Gilbert and Ivan Bunn. A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution. London: Routledge, 1997.
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The product of a collaboration between a historian and a criminologist, this study examines the 1662 trial of Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, overseen by Matthew Hale and resulting in their execution. The authors conclude that the trial was an avoidable mockery of justice that historians have tended to overlook in their quest for understanding over judgment.
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MacFarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 1999.
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With Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, a classic anthropological account of witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England in the county of Essex from 1560 to 1680. Incidents of witchcraft are detailed, as are the courts and procedures, the motivations behind accusations, and the effect of geography, age, class, and gender on the rise of the witch scare.
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Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
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A scholarly history of the subject that also argues for the distinction of witchcraft or the witch hunt in England as opposed to the continent. Describes the size and distribution of witchcraft allegations across England; though a “woman’s crime,” witchcraft was also a crime in which female accusers were plentiful, and women’s testimony unusually vital.
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Intellectual Culture
The intellectual life of the Tudor and Stuart period was revolutionized by humanism, which was imported in large part from the continent but achieved its own distinct English identity, particularly in the early 16th century. Educational theories and practices were based on humanist ideas, which transformed the curricula of schools and universities, as well as rates of literacy and the availability of education for a broader range of ages and classes. The great theoretical and legal ideas and historical treatments of the law, which reached their greatest articulation in Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and John Selden, were also dependent upon the historicism and classicism that defined the humanist movement. Meanwhile, related developments in scientific and medical inquiry also found fertile ground in England, and were manifested in the loose networks and social structures of Elizabethan science as well as the more formal constrictions of the 17th-century Royal Society model of inquiry. None of the achievements in these and other intellectual movements would have been possible were it not for a rich culture of print, fruitfully explored in recent years by literary scholars and historians.
HUMANISM
With its roots in the 15th century, and the transmission of classical and Italian texts from the continent, humanism thrived in England during the 16th century, though ideas of civic participation and republicanism also infused the thought of the English revolution in the century to come. In terms of the debate about the character of humanism in England, McConica 1965 once advanced the claim that Erasmus was essential in its development, influencing ideas of reform that would commingle with later Protestantism. It was a claim disputed by Fox and Guy 1986, who argued instead for the basically pragmatic character of English humanism. Most recently, Dowling 1986 and the Woolfson 2002 collection seek to place humanist ideas in their larger context, as they relate to educational programs, crown patronage, the influence of Italian reformers, or contemporary political thought. Thomas More, one of the leading humanists of the age, merits good treatment by Fox 1982, whileWeiss 1967 explores the equally important impact and dissemination of humanist ideas in the 15th century.
Dowling, Maria. Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
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This work does not examine humanism as it is traditionally understood—with its focus on classical writers, or the study of grammar, logic, or ethics—but instead is useful in stressing the activities of scholars and patrons, educational reform programs and universities. Especially important is Dowling’s discussion of female patronage.
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Fox, Alistair. Thomas More: History and Providence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.
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A good account of More’s literary career, in its humanist, devotional, and polemical aspects, with an extensive section on the Utopia. In examining these writings, Fox attempts to understand More’s perceptions regarding the workings of providence through history and the visible church, and in his later writings through his pending martyrdom.
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Fox, Alistair, and John Guy. Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
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A wide-ranging collection of essays by Guy and Fox that examines English humanism in terms of political culture and the idea of the body politic, the intellectual influences of Thomas Cromwell, and the debates between Thomas More and Christopher St. German. Humanist law and equity, and the relationship between forms and content, are also explored.
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McConica, James. English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
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A stimulating study that seeks to understand the character of English humanist thought and its relationship to a larger political and religious context. The dissemination of Erasmianism and its influence on politics is given astute treatment, as is the role played by patronage, the universities, and the circulation of books.
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Weiss, Roberto. Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, 3d ed. London: Blackwell, 1967.
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An older account of the transition of England into Renaissance humanism, beginning with the arrival of Poggio Bracciolini in 1418. The patrons and scholars, the building of libraries, the attempts to learn Greek, the relations with Byzantine scholars, and the dissemination of Senecan and other manuscripts is extensively explored.
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Woolfson, Jonathan, ed. Reassessing Tudor Humanism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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A gathering of detailed studies that extends across the history of humanism in England, from its importation of Italian learning in the 15th century through the English circle around Erasmus to humanism’s place in Elizabethan culture. The relationship between humanism and medieval learning is also stressed throughout, as is humanism’s influence on social institutions and political and religious change.
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SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
The social and religious dimensions of scientific development, as well as its internal intellectual currents, have been pursued in earnest since the 1970s with Harkness 2007 representing the most recent example of a study that connects emerging methods of empirical inquiry to their urban context, while Webster 1976, in a classic work, embeds developing scientific thought in Puritan biblical injunctions. Hunter 1981, meanwhile, discusses the propagandistic use of a utilitarian “science” among self-interested Restoration partisans, even if it did not fit the reality of scientific endeavor; moreover, the Royal Historical Society was also hardly unique in its pursuit of “modern” scientific methods.
Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House. Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
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A rich examination of scientific communities of London during Elizabeth’s reign and how their networks were dependent on an urban setting and its communication channels to further an emerging experimental theory and practice.
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Hunter, Michael. Science and Society in Restoration England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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An illuminating survey that engages with and critiques the Merton thesis concerning the interconnection between science and Puritanism. According to Hunter, science was not as prominent or “useful” in the period as its propagandists wished to convey; in addition, the Royal Society, one of many such societies, competed with universities even if it did not represent “modern” as opposed to “ancient” science, as many subsequent assumptions contended.
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Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976.
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A classic text that argues for the Puritan pursuit of science and its consequence for modern systems of inquiry. In addition to discussing a wide range of activities he places under the guise of science, Webster traces the interconnections between science, religion, and ethics in a key moment of historical development.
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The Law
The practice and theory of the “high” law of Edward Coke, Francis Bacon, and others have received much attention, but the legal history of the period has also benefited from the approaches of social history, as in Brooks 1986 as well as literary studies such as Hutson 2008. Prest 1972 examines the workings of the Inns of Court, while Baker 1990 and Boyer 2003 provide good analysis of the more theoretical approaches to the law.
Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History, 3d ed. London: Butterworths, 1990.
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An excellent and concise introduction for students of legal history, this volume extends across commercial and constitutional as well as criminal law throughout the centuries, with substantive discussions of the Tudor and Stuart period.
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Boyer, Allen D. Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age. Jurists—Profiles in Legal Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
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A readable yet scholarly biography that treats the life of Elizabeth and James’ attorney general, including his alliance with Cecil, his disputes with Francis Bacon, his shaping of the common law, and his place within the larger context of the times.
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Brooks, C. W. Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The “Lower Branch” of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
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A large and detailed study of lawyers and clients in Tudor and Stuart England, including fine analyses of the royal courts, litigation, clerical fees and incomes, and popular perceptions of the profession. The diversity of legal practice is emphasized, as is the increase in litigation during the Tudor period, based upon demographic, social, and economic factors.
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Hutson, Lorna. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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An inventive and erudite literary analysis that argues for the influence of the law on early modern drama, in which popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric contributed to the role played by evidence and suspicion in the creation and motivations of characters. The dramatic writings that came out of the Inns of Court are also examined.
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Prest, Wilfrid Robertson. The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
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The first full history and still-definitive study of the Inns of Court, this work explores England’s “third university” and its membership, professional aspects, administrative practices, and legal educational program, as well as its influence on larger political and religious developments.
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EDUCATION
A number of excellent overviews have been published that examine the state of education in Tudor and Stuart England, and focus in part on its accessibility across social groups. Charlton 1968 traces the humanist influence on educational ideas, O’Day 1982 elucidates contemporary theories in relation to practice, and Simon 1979 discusses the impact on the middling classes. Van Cleave 1990provides a good survey of education as a whole, while Charlton 1968 represents an early examination of educational developments, with the university represented by Kearney 1970 andMcConica 1986.
Charlton, Kenneth. Education in Renaissance England. London: Routledge, 1968.
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An analysis of the transformation of educational practices as a result of the cultural and humanist revolutions of the 15th and 16th centuries. Educational theories in England are also given emphasis, particularly as they were imported from Italy.
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Kearney, Hugh. Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–1700. London: Faber, 1970.
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A survey of the universities, particularly as they were influenced by the changes of the Reformation, including Puritanism later on, and the humanism of the court and figures such as Thomas More.
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McConica, James, ed. The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. 3, The Collegiate University. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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An enormous and erudite work that includes a number of important essays by leading scholars, with topics encompassing the relationship of the university to the town, the state, and the state church. Finances and architecture are also explored, as well as faculties and studies in the Tudor and Stuart period.
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O’Day, Rosemary. Education and Society, 1500–1800. New York: Longman, 1982.
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A fine elucidation of contemporary notions about educational programs and curricula, and the “impact of theory on practice” or “the balance between conservative and advanced views of the educational process” in the 16th century. O’Day’s range extends from childhood education up through university study, as well as the education of clergy and lawyers.
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Simon, Joan. Education and Society in Tudor England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
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In her larger survey of education in Tudor England, Simon argues that the major beneficiaries of educational growth in Tudor England were the middle classes, established tradesmen, and yeomen farmers. “While gentlemen were particularly well placed to take advantage of opportunities,” she writes, “all above the swelling ranks of the poor could profit” (p. 293).
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Van Cleave, Alexander Michael. The Growth of English Education, 1348–1648: A Social and Cultural History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.
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A comprehensive survey across centuries of educational growth in England, including notable figures involved in its advancement, salaried lectureships in the universities, the role of gentry and aristocratic families in relation to education, and educational provisions for women.
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PRINT CULTURE AND LITERACY
Print culture and the world of the book have received prominent attention in the last two decades, and illuminate our knowledge of the circulation and dissemination of visual and textual material in Tudor and Stuart England, as Hellinga, et al. 1999–2002 demonstrates. Sharpe and Zwicker 2003has, in the meantime, contributed to an understanding about how such texts—cheap broadsides, as examined by Watt 1991 and Spufford 1981, or high literature—were read, while Fox 2000 resists the notion that oral and literate culture were mutually exclusive, and Cressy 1980 explores the history of literacy in general during the period.
Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
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While acknowledging the imperfections of the evidence, this work nevertheless contributes significantly to an understanding about levels of literacy across the regions and decades of Tudor and Stuart England, particularly as they were affected by factors such as occupation and social status.
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Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford University Press, 2000.
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A significant contribution to the study of oral and literate culture, and how the two were reciprocally informed by each other in Tudor and Stuart England. An exhaustive use of sources is deployed to demonstrate how the oral and the textual, literacy and illiteracy, cannot be so crudely dichotomized—a claim that is not new, but that is further given weight here.
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Hellinga, Lotte, J. B. Trapp, John Bernard, and D. F. McKenzie, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vols. 3–4. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2002.
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A massive compendium of essays by leading scholars covering the history of the book in Britain, with topics including oral tradition and scribal culture, the transition from manuscript to print culture, the book trade and book production, the reading and ownership of books, and specific case studies centering on books and figures such as Samuel Hartlib and John Donne.
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Sharpe, Kevin and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511483974Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of essays that emphasizes the history of reading practices as well as the relationship between reading, readers, and print culture in Tudor and Stuart England. Reading manuals as well as marginalia, letters and diaries are studied as to their clues into “the reader’s side of things,” although writers and publishers are also touched upon.
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Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories. London: Methuen, 1981.
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An analysis of the influence of cheap printed literature on popular mentalities, exploring the demand and distribution of such works as well as the messages contained within them. “Godly” as well as “merry” and “chivalric” books fall under discussion, and are contrasted interestingly with French popular literature as well.
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Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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An outstanding work that primarily traces the production distribution and circulation of broadside ballads, illustrations, chapbooks, and other “popular” literature. Changes and continuities in taste are tracked across time, and the argument is made for the interconnection between printed text and picture, the elite and the popular, and the godly and ungodly.
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LITERATURE
The scholarship on literature in Tudor and Stuart England is plentiful, but good general overviews of the period’s literary history are available, as are works examining the historical and political contexts of the period’s drama, poetry, and prose. Loewenstein and Mueller 2002 examines book and print culture as well as patronage and reading patterns, while Kerrigan 2008 extends the relationship between literature and politics to the four nations in the “archipelago.” Simpson 2004 traces the earlier history of literary texts and movements through the mid-Tudor age, while Sharpe 1987 andZwicker 1993 examine the political implications of literature during Charles’s reign and beyond.
Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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An excellent recent work that focuses on the literary relationship between the four nations of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as their own cultural productions, and argues against traditional notions of hardened boundaries between them.
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Loewenstein, David, and Janel Mueller, eds. The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521631563Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A vast and outstanding collection of literary and historical essays by leading scholars that examines habits of reading and literature, the context of the household and church, literary patronage, manuscript transmission and circulation, and many other topics.
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Sharpe, Kevin. Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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A lucid book about culture that argues for the deeper political issues at work in the apparently insular literature sponsored by Charles’s court. Works by William Davenant, Thomas Carew and others are insightfully treated, as are the Caroline masque and love poetry.
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Simpson, James. The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. 2, Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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A literary history that extends from Chaucer through the reign of Henry VIII, delving into early Tudor drama and major and minor literary figures and arguing for a continuity between medieval and early modern literature as a whole.
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Zwicker, Steven N. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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Taking as its theme “the role of polemic in the imagination,” Zwicker examines a range of texts beginning with Charles I’s Eikon Basilike and continuing through Dryden and Locke. The presence of civil war and Restoration politics in these tracts is emphasized throughout.
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POPULAR CULTURE
Since the publication of Burke 2009 (originally published in 1978) the subject of popular culture has undergone a renaissance, intersecting with other aspects of “ordinary” men and women’s lives, including their participation in the public sphere, in riots, or crowd protest and oral culture as a whole.Underdown 1985 extends the analysis into the field of “popular politics,” as does Harris 1987 in that author’s important study of crowds during the Restoration age. Harris 1995 and Reay 1985 also offer useful supplements in the range of articles they present.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3d ed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
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A classic work that reconstructs popular and folk culture in preindustrial Europe, including England. Problems and methods in investigating popular culture are examined, as is the transmission of festivals and other nonelite expressions through society. Folk archetypes, carnival, rituals, and songs are all explored in light of the larger cultural and social attitudes they reflect. A new introduction is included in the third edition.
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Harris, Tim. London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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An illuminating exploration of politics and religion from the crowd’s point of view, including its sloganeering, pope-burning, and other creative expressions of public opinion.
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Harris, Tim, ed. Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1800. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995.
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A fine collection of essays that reconsiders the nature of popular culture twenty years after Burke and emphasizes its diverse nature and continued intersection with elites. Subjects that are examined include gender, mistress-servant relations, literacy, medicine, and religion.
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Reay, Barry, ed. Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.
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An excellent collection of essays by seven leading historians utilizing anthropological and sociological insights to understand the culture of ordinary men and women. Subjects include the survival of traditional calendar festivals, cheap printed literature, popular religion, and protests such as women-dominated food riots.
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Underdown, David. Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
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Examines the behavior of ordinary people in the counties and farming societies of Dorset, Somerset, and Wiltshire during the civil war. Local support of and resistance to the war is examined, with a rich selection of quotes from the people themselves. Their attitudes toward maypoling, dancing, skimmingtons, and sports, and how these attitudes shaped their larger political and religious affiliations, are also explored.
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