Elizabethan Worlds: documents

If focusing on the religious settlement after 1558, there are a number of likely sources:

• Elizabeth and Archbishop Grindal on prophesyings, 4.11 and 4.12 (1st ed.) relate strongly to
• Field and Wilcox, Admonition, and their criticism of the established church (4.10, 1st ed.). Is this the Puritan criticism?
• 4.8 and 4.9 are the established church taking on another side to the criticism of the religious settlement, this time from the Catholics.
• The introductory essay (1st ed.) of ch. 4 also has a quote or two regarding "Church Papists," people who remained in the Protestant Church of England, but held to traditional religious beliefs as long as possible.
  

Elizabethan Worlds: secondary work suggestions

If interested in the Elizabethan religious settlement as a focus,

• Bernard, George W. 'The Church of England, c.1529-c.1642'. History, 75:244 (1990), 183-206 is available online at booth library -- go to periodicals list for history (printed in UK, in case there is another by that name).
• Haigh, Christopher. Elizabeth I (Profiles in Power). 2nd edn. London: Longman, 1998. A less positive spin, to put it mildly. This should be in the library.
• There is also Haigh, Christopher. 'Rowse, Elizabeth and England'. History Today, 53 (May 2003), 25-28. available online through Booth, which might have something (Rowse is a very old school historian who Haigh would most probably criticize).
• Haigh, Christopher (ed.). The reign of Elizabeth I. Basingstoke, 1984. although I don't know if we have that at Booth or not.
• Norm Jones has a number of books and articles on the settlement.
  

Reformation(s) Papers: document suggestions

In response to a query about documents that support Dickens’s claim that the reformation came from the bottom up besides the Confession of John Pykas, I suggest

• 3.3 (1st ed.) The Opening of the Reformation Parliament (November 3–December 17, 1529) which has the MPs from the House of Commons quite willing to go along with Henry on this. Most of their reasons are more materialistic than Pykas, but they certainly buy into the idea of the corruption of the old church.
• At the beginning of chapter 3 (1st. ed., and as a separate doc. in the new ed.) John Colet, who preached at the Convocation of English clerics summoned to discuss how to suppress heresy in 1511, attacks his audience for their venality and worldliness.
• Ditto, William Melton (d. 1528), master of Michaelhouse, Cambridge, preaching in Latin to candidates for the clergy (1510).
• Ditto, Simon Fish (d. 1531), who framed his attack on the clergy as a plea to Henry VIII to curb corrupt, greedy priests, bishops, pardoners, summoners, and friars.
  

Some bit of Dickens might be online. But there is also a chapter of Dickens in a collection by Marshall and that and Dickens should be in most university libraries.

Revolutions Seminar: reading

Jeremy Black, "Making a world safe for Whigs - Revisiting the Glorious Revolution: Patrick Dillon, Tim Harris and Edward Vallance on the Glorious Revolution," is a review essay on

• Patrick Dillon The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World (2006)
• Tim Harris Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 (2006)
• Edward Vallance The Glorious Revolution: 1688 - Britain's Fight for Liberty (2006)

It is not quite a fair revisionist reading. But it helps place them on a continuum of historiographical approaches.

Reformation(s) : bibliography suggestions

Regarding Dickens, The best works (besides his general intro. textbook) are in P. Marshall, ed., The Impact of the English Reformation, 1500. The are many recent articles and chapters continuing the Reformation historiography debate in Sources and Debates, ch. 3 on the following questions:

• Was the Reformation popular, shaped by grass-roots movements from below?
• Was it unpopular and forced by a few powerful members of the elite from above?
  

See also, now, R. H. Fritze, "The English Reformation: Obedience, Destruction and Cultural Adaptation," JEcclH 56, 1 (2005). G. Redworth,"Whatever Happened to the English Reformation?," HT 37 (October 1987) (available online) discusses one set of early post-revisionists which go back to Dickens and argue against Haigh and Duffy.

Discussion Leaders' documents; chapter 5

Student discussion leaders are asked to select documents from Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 5 (society ca. 1600):, listing 3 documents from chapter 5, 1st ed. (one from the new chapter from the 2nd edition) with 1-2 sentences on each explaining what the class should get out of those documents. Then, during the next class I announce to the rest of class which documents they should read based on those documents selected.

Discussion Leaders' documents; chapter 4

Student discussion leaders are asked to select documents from Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 4 (Elizabethan Worlds):, listing 3 documents from chapter 5, 1st ed. (one from the new chapter from the 2nd edition) with 1-2 sentences on each explaining what the class should get out of those documents. Then, during the next class I announce to the rest of class which documents they should read based on those documents selected.

Discussion Leaders' documents, group "c"; chapter 3 [post-1547]

By Mon. morning, 22 Sept., post a list of 3 documents from chapter 3 (one should be from the 2nd half of the chapter in the new edition which I will hand out to you on Tuesday) with 1-2 sentences on each explaining what the class should get out of those documents.

Then, during class on Tues., 23 Sept., I will announce to the rest of class which documents they should read for Thursday, 25 Sept. (based on those documents you all have selected), and you will introduce the documents to class.

Reformation historiography: an addition

The following review article came to our notice too late to place it in the Historians' Debates section of Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, 2nd ed., ch. 3. But it opens with a useful brief discussion of changing keywords in Reformation historiography. R. H. Fritze, "The English Reformation: Obedience, Destruction and Cultural Adaptation," JEcclH 56, 1 (2005).

Discussion Leaders' documents, group "b", chaper 3 (pre-1547)

His 3100, Fall 2008, Discussion Group Assignments: Post a ranked list of 3 documents from ch. 3, Sources and Debates with 1-2 sentences on each explaining what the class should get out of those documents by September 15 (by noon)

I will then draw up a list of 5 documents which the whole class should read and the group will then be responsible for presenting the documents Sept. 18 to the class, ask questions, present context (using: other documents in the chapter and its introduction, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford English Dictionary, and textbook), and, if necessary, begin the discussion between themselves.

Discussion Leaders' documents, group 1, chapter 2

His 3100, Fall 2008, Discussion Group Assignments: Post a ranked list of 3 documents from ch. 2, Sources and Debates with 1-2 sentences on each explaining what the class should get out of those documents by September 9 (by noon)

I will then draw up a list of 5 documents which the whole class should read and the group will then be responsible for presenting the documents Sept. 11 to the class, ask questions, present context (using: other documents in the chapter and its introduction, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford English Dictionary, and textbook), and, if necessary, begin the discussion between themselves.

charles ii's entry into london

The 2nd edition of Early Modern England will have a detail from the following painting on the cover:

Charles Stoop, Charles II's Cavalcade through the City of London (1661)?

A contemporary engraving of the entry for his coronation is

surviving titles 1600-1700

Compare this with discussion on Early Modern England, ch. 8 to show the increase in tracts in the 1640s and 1650s. From David Cressy, "Revolutionary England 1640-1642," P & P 181 (2003): 61.

Some Statistics on the Number of Surviving Printed Titles for Great Britain and Dependencies from the Beginnings of Print in England to the year 1800, by Alain Veylit is based on the raw numbers from ESTC.

mapping lord darnley's murder

contemporary sketch map of 1567 murder (from 1576?)

The Mermaid and the Hare

This placard denounced Mary Queen of Scots and Bothwell soon after the Darnley murder, and certainly suggests a popular reaction to the murder in Scotland if not a fully developed public sphere there in the mid-sixteenth century.

Another James

Compare the portrait of James VI and I in Early Modern England (2nd. ed., p. 218) with this portrait, from 1595, when only James VI, by Adrian Vanson as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Whither social history?

In updating the "Historians' Debates" sections of the social and cultural history chapters for the 2nd ed. of Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, we discovered a wealth of new studies. We list those at the end of chs. 1, 5, and 9. There appear, however, to be two general critiques of the directions taken by current soc/cult history.

• First, it is increasingly common to reject any binary like elite/popular (or perhaps a multiplicity of those binaries). Ultimately, however, this comes down very much to insisting that there is also a middling sorts.
  
• Second, new cultural history often means a search a la James Scott for hidden transcripts--how the non-elite worked secretly or obliquely to modify the public transcripts. The latter is what is in most records (e.g. State Papers, Quarter Session records) and is how the elite wants the relationship to be seen (there is irony in the attempt to denigrate elite/popular, while letting it reappear as a way to talk about these things). So the public transcript is always in contestation, is always being challenged, and the only way to get at this challenge, the hidden transcript is to read the pubic transcript obliquely. Years ago, USA Republican VP Spiro Agnew attacked effete, impudent snobs (those who didn't like the government's approach) because the silent majority was really on his/Nixon's side. Hidden transcripts, like the silent majority's intention, is essentially in the eye of the beholder.
• The new social/cultural history is probably correct in its general assessments. And it can be very exciting for students (like approaching history through borderlands, or margins, or transgressions). But isn't it also in some sense constructed, instead of flowing from the record?
  
• A corollary of the weapons of the weak/hidden transcripts argument: is that the people were decidedly political (pretty much in a timeless fashion) but were too bright to confront power directly (oh and to look at crowds and incipient political belief is wrong because they are already political--this one confuses me a bit)--and earlier historians are wrong for insisting that village rioters could ever have been pre-political.
  

Tilbury speechless?

This painting on wood in a church is of Elizabeth at Tilbury. Underneath the painting is printed a version of the following speech that another person recorded in a sermon of 1612:

• Come on now my companions at armes, and fellow Souldiers, in the field, now for the Lord, for your Queene, and for the kingdome[.] [Flor what are these proud Philistines, that they should revile the Hoast of the living God? I have been your Prince in peace, so will I be in warre[;] neither will I bid you goe and fight, but come and let us fight the battell of the Lord[.] [Tlhe enemie perhaps may challenge my sexe for that I am a woman, so may I likewise charge their mould for that they are but men, whose breath is in their nostrels, and if God doe not charge England with the sinnes of England, little doe I feare their force.... Si deus nobiscum quis contra nos?
  

Compare this version of the speech she gave with that in Early Modern England and in Sources and Debates. The one in the text, dates from 1623 and is first printed in 1654.

See also: S. Frye, “The myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 23, 1 (1992) [use of Tilbury Speech by the English (in word and image) ever since it “appeared” in 1623]; J.M. Green, “‘I my self’: Queen Elizabeth I's oration at Tilbury Camp,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997) [re-asserts that the traditionally accepted text is genuine]

Thomas Cromwell Portrayed: Not

Patrick Collinson, Short Oxford History of The British Isles: The Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), xiv, gives a good reading of a portrait of Thomas Cromwell (see left). Unfortunately, I find the identical portrait accompanying the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article of George Neville, third Baron Bergavenny (c.1469-1535). Which is correct?  Inquiring minds want to know? Is the Oxford History or the Oxford DNB correct?






Dr. Philip Carter, Publication Editor, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was kind enough to respond to my query:

•  "it appears that the image we use is correctly identified as Holbein's pencil sketch of Neville, despite the addition of 'Lord Cromwell' in the bottom left of the image.  Roy Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court (183), p. 21 identifies the portrait as Neville and notes that the reference to 'Lord Cromwell' and 'Holbein' was added later; J.Rowlands Holbein: Portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger, complete edition (1985) also identifies the portrait as of Neville."

Reformation England: the bibliography

Bibliographies covering the 16th-century Reformations (Dickens, Scarisbrick, Haigh, Duffy, MacCullough, etc.)

• J.P. Sommerville, Reformations and the State 1500-1689
• History of the British Isles IV, 1500–1700 (University of Oxford History Faculty 2006)
  
• Government, Politics and Society in England, 1547–58 (University of Oxford Modern History Faculty, 2005)
• An introduction to the historiography of the Reformation (St. George's School, brief)
• The English Reformation (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Folger Institute reading list, 2004)
• English Reign of Philip and Mary, 1553/4-1558 (2007-2008, AD Wright, University of Leeds Library)
• Early Modern England, 1450-1720 (York University, Fall 2007)
• THE HENRICIAN REFORMATION 1509 - 1547 (G.W. Bernard)
• POWER, PATRONAGE AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND 1509‑1660 (G.W. Bernard)