scholarly journals Royal Opportunity: Noble Marriages in the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI/I, 1558-1625

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christianna Kay

<p>This thesis explores Queen Elizabeth I’s and King James VI/I’s management of and involvement in noble marriages from 1558 to 1625 by merging two methodologies: an analysis of an extensive, custom-made database of 380 noble marriages with an examination of primary sources like state papers, personal correspondence, diaries, and ambassadorial reports. This study demonstrates that “noble-marriage management” was a single but efficient method for the implementation of many facets of early modern rule—this made it an important apparatus of the monarchical office and a significant conduit of power. Illuminated within this thesis are Queen Elizabeth’s and King James’s tactics for handling noble marital alliances which included participation and support, avoidance and opposition. They applied their exclusive crown privileges like plural prerogatives of wards’ and widows’ marriages and in loco parentis rights in attempts to control marital unions and they inaugurated new monarch-noble bonds through their patronage of weddings. They communicated religious, succession, and Anglo-Scottish union policies, brought peace, and cultivated a crown-supportive aristocracy by means of their noble marriage involvement. Both monarchs employed multiple aspects of the royal prerogative to manage marriages which, at times, involved manipulating courts, bypassing Parliament, and prolonging punishments. Elizabeth and James also used the royal prerogative to forge their respective legacies of a Protestant kingdom and a unified England and Scotland. By utilising their exclusive privileges, both monarchs secured the freedom and power to intervene in noble marital alliances which preserved the hierarchical system of monarchy, achieving a pro-monarch balance of power and internal stability. In particular, it was through supportive involvement in marriages that Elizabeth and James perpetuated the patronage system and established all-important monarch-noble connections which upheld royal authority. Monarch-noble links became especially important as parliamentary debates on the legitimacy and use of crown privileges increased in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, exposing both monarchs’ absolutist tendencies.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christianna Kay

<p>This thesis explores Queen Elizabeth I’s and King James VI/I’s management of and involvement in noble marriages from 1558 to 1625 by merging two methodologies: an analysis of an extensive, custom-made database of 380 noble marriages with an examination of primary sources like state papers, personal correspondence, diaries, and ambassadorial reports. This study demonstrates that “noble-marriage management” was a single but efficient method for the implementation of many facets of early modern rule—this made it an important apparatus of the monarchical office and a significant conduit of power. Illuminated within this thesis are Queen Elizabeth’s and King James’s tactics for handling noble marital alliances which included participation and support, avoidance and opposition. They applied their exclusive crown privileges like plural prerogatives of wards’ and widows’ marriages and in loco parentis rights in attempts to control marital unions and they inaugurated new monarch-noble bonds through their patronage of weddings. They communicated religious, succession, and Anglo-Scottish union policies, brought peace, and cultivated a crown-supportive aristocracy by means of their noble marriage involvement. Both monarchs employed multiple aspects of the royal prerogative to manage marriages which, at times, involved manipulating courts, bypassing Parliament, and prolonging punishments. Elizabeth and James also used the royal prerogative to forge their respective legacies of a Protestant kingdom and a unified England and Scotland. By utilising their exclusive privileges, both monarchs secured the freedom and power to intervene in noble marital alliances which preserved the hierarchical system of monarchy, achieving a pro-monarch balance of power and internal stability. In particular, it was through supportive involvement in marriages that Elizabeth and James perpetuated the patronage system and established all-important monarch-noble connections which upheld royal authority. Monarch-noble links became especially important as parliamentary debates on the legitimacy and use of crown privileges increased in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, exposing both monarchs’ absolutist tendencies.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Talia Pollock

<p>This thesis examines political prophecy in England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The belief that foreknowledge of events could be attained through means such as the practice of astrology, revelation from God, or the interpretation of supposedly prophetic texts was widespread in English society during the early modern period. This thesis discusses how those both within and outside of the government used prophecy in their engagement with the political issues which faced England during Elizabeth’s reign, especially in relation to religion and the succession. Because prophecy offered a source of authority for political change it was often employed in opposition to established authorities, prompting legislation criminalising seditious prophecies and printed works condemning them. By examining a wide range of primary sources, including assize records, Privy Council reports, depositions, diplomatic and administrative correspondence, and printed tracts and sermons, this thesis reveals how prophecy pervaded the political culture of Elizabethan England.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Talia Pollock

<p>This thesis examines political prophecy in England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The belief that foreknowledge of events could be attained through means such as the practice of astrology, revelation from God, or the interpretation of supposedly prophetic texts was widespread in English society during the early modern period. This thesis discusses how those both within and outside of the government used prophecy in their engagement with the political issues which faced England during Elizabeth’s reign, especially in relation to religion and the succession. Because prophecy offered a source of authority for political change it was often employed in opposition to established authorities, prompting legislation criminalising seditious prophecies and printed works condemning them. By examining a wide range of primary sources, including assize records, Privy Council reports, depositions, diplomatic and administrative correspondence, and printed tracts and sermons, this thesis reveals how prophecy pervaded the political culture of Elizabethan England.</p>


Early Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Plank

Abstract This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.


2016 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koenraad Brosens ◽  
Klara Alen ◽  
Astrid Slegten ◽  
Fred Truyen

Abstract The essay introduces MapTap, a research project that zooms in on the ever-changing social networks underpinning Flemish tapestry (1620 – 1720). MapTap develops the young and still slightly amorphous field of Formal Art Historical Social Network Research (FAHSNR) and is fueled by Cornelia, a custom-made database. Cornelia’s unique data model allows researchers to organize attribution and relational data from a wide array of sources in such a way that the complex multiplex and multimode networks emerging from the data can be transformed into partial unimode networks that enable proper FAHSNR. A case study revealing the key roles played by women in the tapestry landscape shows how this kind of slow digital art history can further our understanding of early modern creative communities and industries.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Chin-Hao Huang ◽  
David C. Kang

Abstract State formation occurred in Korea and Japan 1,000 years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation and learning, not bellicist competition. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance-of-power system with regular existential threats. Korea and Japan emerged as states between the fifth and ninth centuries CE and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war or suppress revolt: the longevity of dynasties in these countries is evidence of both the peacefulness of their region and their internal stability. Rather, Korea and Japan developed state institutions through emulation and learning from China. The elites of both copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy in the competition between the court and the nobility.


2020 ◽  

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.


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