David Brown. Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars. Studies in Early Modern Irish History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 311. $120.00 (cloth).

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 442-443
Author(s):  
Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Anderson

Abstract In spite of Ireland’s rich and complex religious history, the influence of the Old Testament in the shaping of the island is often overlooked. This study traces the use and reception of the Old Testament in Ireland through the centuries, focusing on stories of transmission, translation, and unexpected influence. In early Christian and medieval Ireland, the transmission of the Old Testament in diverse contexts points to an important role for the Old Testament in relation to social formation and notions of Irish history. Moving to early modern Ireland, the story of the translation of the Old Testament into Irish demonstrates how this collection contributed to contested issues of identity in this highly-charged era. Finally, we encounter stories of unexpected influence relating to Ireland and the Old Testament in James Ussher and John Nelson Darby. In both cases, ideas concerning the Old Testament that took shape in Ireland would go on to have impact on a global scale, even if this subsequent influence was a matter of accidence. Taken together, it is argued that the Old Testament has played a much more prominent role in the shaping of the social, cultural, and religious landscape of Ireland than is often assumed.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-565
Author(s):  
KATE LOVEMAN

Reading, society and politics in early modern England. Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix+363. ISBN 0-521-82434-6. £50.00.The politics of information in early modern Europe. Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viii+310. ISBN 0-415-20310-4. £75.00.Literature, satire and the early Stuart state. By Andrew McRae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+250. ISBN 0-521-81495-2. £45.00.The writing of royalism, 1628–1660. By Robert Wilcher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+403. ISBN 0-521-66183-8. £45.00.Politicians and pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum. By Jason Peacey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xi+417. ISBN 0-7546-0684-8. £59.95.The ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration publicist. By Lois G. Schwoerer. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii+349. ISBN 0-8018-6727-4. £32.00.In 1681 the Italian newswriter Giacomo Torri incurred the wrath of the French ambassador to the Venetian Republic with his anti-French reporting. The ambassador ordered Torri to ‘cease and desist or be thrown into the canal’. Torri, who was in the pay of the Holy Roman Emperor, responded to the ambassador's threat with a report that ‘the king of France had fallen from his horse, and that this was a judgement of God’. Three of the ambassadors' men were then found attacking Torri ‘by someone who commanded them to stop in the name of the Most Excellent Heads of the Council of Ten … but they replied with certain vulgarities, saying they knew neither heads nor councils’. Discussed by Mario Infelise in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron's collection, this was a very minor feud in the seventeenth-century battles over political information, but it exemplifies several of the recurring themes of the books reviewed here. First, the growing recognition by political authorities across Europe that news was a commodity worthy of investment. Secondly, the variety of official and unofficial sanctions applied in an attempt to control the market for news publications. Thirdly, the recalcitrance of writers and publishers in the face of these sanctions: whether motivated by payment or principle, disseminators of political information showed great resourcefulness in frustrating attempts to limit their activities. These six books investigate aspects of seventeenth-century news and politics or, alternatively, seventeenth-century literature and politics – the distinction between ‘news’ and certain literary genres being, as several of these authors show, often difficult to make.


Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Valentina Vadi

Abstract Gentili’s conceptualization of war as a conflict between states attempted to limit the legitimacy of war to external wars only, thus precluding the legitimacy of civil wars. It reflected both the emergence of sovereign states and the vision of international law as a law among polities rather than individuals. The conceptualization of war as a dispute settlement mechanism among polities rather than a punishment for breach of the law of nations and the idea of the bilateral justice of war humanized the conduct of warfare and the content of peace treaties. The idea of perfect war excluded brigandage, piracy, and civil wars from its purview. Some scholars have suggested that perfect war had a dark side, legitimizing imperial expansion. Others have cautioned that Gentili explicitly opposed imperial expansion rather adopting anti-imperialist stances. This article suggests that these ambivalent readings of the Gentilian oeuvre reflect the ambivalence of the early modern law of nations. Under the early modern law of nations, aggression for the sake of empire was clearly unjust; nonetheless, imperial expansion took place. Whereas ‘a law which many transgress[ed] [wa]s nonetheless a law’, there was a wide divide between theory and practice.1


Author(s):  
Imogen Peck

This chapter illuminates one of the shadowiest corners of our understanding of early modern memory: the recollections of ordinary citizens. Drawing primarily on legal records, it reconstructs the multiplicity of ways in which men and women from across the social spectrum remembered the British Civil Wars and explores the wider social and cultural significance of these recollections. It argues that memories of the recent past acted, variously, as an articulation and affirmation of identity, expression of defiance, source of solidarity, locus of hope, and as a strategic and descriptive device. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates that while some people’s recollections of the recent past were influenced by attempts to shape public memory, people also had the capacity to subvert, co-opt, and reject these interpretations. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of early modern memory and the creativity and agency of those who deployed it.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY

The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke from this restriction, notably D. B. Quinn, Hugh Kearney, and Aidan Clarke, made significant contributions to the conceptualization of the histories of colonial British America, early modern England, and Scotland. These achievements were challenged by the New British History turn which, for the early modern period, has transpired to be no more than traditional English political history in mufti. None the less, writing on the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and colonial British America has endured and even flourished. Such endeavour has succeeded where the focus has been on people rather than places, where authors have been alert to cross-cultural encounters, where they have identified their subject as part of European or global history, and where they have rejected the compartmentalization of political from social and economic history. The success of such authors should encourage practitioners of both English history and the New British History to follow their examples for the benefit of endeavours which will always be complementary.


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