Synopses & Reviews
In recent years, new scholarship has thoroughly revised our view of both the political and cultural histories of late Elizabethan and Stuart England. This book integrates recent work by historians and scholars in these related disciplines into an original interpretation of how political culture developed during this eventful period. R. Malcolm Smuts emphasizes the diversity of cultural perspectives available in the period; the role played by honor, law, divine providence and humanist scholarship; and the profound importance of religious tensions in shaping political imagination.
Synopsis
This book provides a fresh synthesis of relationships between cultural history and politics, from the eve of the Armada to the death of Charles II in 1685. It rejects whiggish and Marxist teleologies that have shaped previous accounts of this subject and emphasises instead the diversity of cultural perspectives available in the period; the role played by concepts of honour, law, divine providence and humanist scholarship; the profound importance of religious tensions in shaping political imagination; and the growing cultural importance of conflict and partisanship during and after the Civil War.
Synopsis
This book integrates recent work by historians and scholars in the fields of political and cultural history into an original interpretation of how political culture developed in late Elizabethan and Stuart England.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-192) and index.
About the Author
R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
Table of Contents
Frames of Reference * Cultural History and Seventeenth-Century Politics * Honor * Law * Providentialism * Humanism and the Imitation of Antiquity *
Political Imagination, c. 1585-1640 * Religious Conflict and Invented Traditions * Cults of Authority, Royal and Otherwise * Faction, Rebellion and Violence * Court, Country and Town * Classicism, Nostalgia and Cultural Rhetoric *
From Civil War to Tory Reaction * Civil War Cultural History after Revisionism * Print and the Dissemination of Controversy * Millenarianism, Republicanism and Cromwellianism * An Ambiguous Restoration * The Renewal of Partisanship * Society, Culture and Politics * The Crisis of 1679-81 and the Hardening of Partisan Cultures