This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.

Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England models and refines the study of these complicated collections. Several of its contributors question and redefine the terms we use to describe miscellanies and anthologies. Two senior scholars correct the misidentification of a scribe and, in so doing, uncover evidence of a Catholic, probably Jesuit, priest and community in a trio of manuscripts. Additional contributors show compilers interpreting, attributing, and arranging texts, as well as passively accepting others’ editorial decisions. While manuscript verse miscellanies remain appropriately central to the collection, several essays also involve print and prose, ranging from letters to sermons and even political prophesies. Using extensive textual and bibliographical evidence, the collection offers stimulating new readings of literature, politics, and religion in the early modern period, and promises to make important interventions in academic studies of the history of the book.

This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.

In the period between 1575 and 1625, civic peace in England, Scotland, and Ireland was persistently threatened by various kinds of religiously inspired violence, involving conspiracies, rebellions, and foreign invasions. Religious divisions divided local communities in all three kingdoms, but they also impacted relations between the nations, and in the broader European continent. The challenges posed by actual or potential religious violence gave rise to complex responses, including efforts to impose religious uniformity through preaching campaigns and regulation of national churches; an expanded use of the press as a medium of religious and political propaganda; improved government surveillance; the selective incarceration of English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics; and a variety of diplomatic and military initiatives, undertaken not only by royal governments but also by private individuals. The result was the development of more robust and resilient, although still vulnerable, states in all three kingdoms and, after the dynastic union of Britain in 1603, an effort to create a single state incorporating all of them. R. Malcolm Smuts traces the story of how this happened by moving beyond frameworks of national and institutional history, to understand the ebb and flow of events and processes of religious and political change across frontiers. The study pays close attention to interactions between the political, cultural, intellectual, ecclesiastical, military, and diplomatic dimensions of its subject. A final chapter explores how and why provisional solutions to the problem of violent, religiously inflected conflict collapsed in the reign of Charles I.

Printed images were ubiquitous in early modern Britain, and they often convey powerful messages which are all the more important for having circulated widely at the time. Yet, by comparison with printed texts, these images have been neglected, particularly by historians to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest. This volume helps remedy this state of affairs. Complementing the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 (www.bpi1700.org.uk), it offers a series of essays which exemplify the many ways in which such visual material can throw light on the history of the period. Ranging from religion to politics, polemic to satire, natural science to consumer culture, the collection explores how printed images need to be read in terms of the visual syntax understood by contemporaries, their full meaning often only becoming clear when they are located in the context in which they were produced and deployed. The result is not only to illustrate the sheer richness of material of this kind, but also to underline the importance of the messages which it conveys, which often come across more strongly in visual form than through textual commentaries. With contributions from many leading exponents of the cultural history of early modern Britain, including experts on religion, politics, science and art, the book's appeal will be equally wide, demonstrating how every facet of British culture in the period can be illuminated through the study of printed images.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Andrew McRae examines the relation between literature and politics at a pivotal moment in English history. He argues that the most influential and incisive political satire in this period may be found in manuscript libels, scurrilous pamphlets and a range of other material written and circulated under the threat of censorship. These are the unauthorised texts of early Stuart England. From his analysis of these texts, McRae argues that satire, as the pre-eminent literary mode of discrimination and stigmatisation, helped people make sense of the confusing political conditions of the early Stuart era. It did so partly through personal attacks and partly also through sophisticated interventions into ongoing political and ideological debates. In such forms satire provided resources through which contemporary writers could define new models of political identity and construct new discourses of dissent. This book wil be of interest to political and literary historians alike.