1,721,003 research outputs found
The drama of coronation: medieval ceremony in early modern England
No full textThe coronation was, and perhaps still is, one of the most important ceremonies of a monarch’s reign. This book examines the five coronations that took place in England between 1509 and 1559: those of Henry VIII, Anne Bolyen, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. It considers how the sacred rite and its related ceremonies and pageants responded to monarchical and religious change and charts how they were interpreted by contemporary observers. Hunt challenges the popular position that has conflated royal ceremony with political propaganda and argues for a deeper understanding of the symbolic complexity of ceremony. At the heart of the study is an investigation into the vexed issues of legitimacy and representation which leads Hunt to identify the emergence of an important and fruitful exchange between ceremony and drama. This exchange will have significant implications for our understanding both of the period’s theatre and of the cultural effects of the Protestant Reformation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of late medieval and early modern history and literature.<br/
Republic: Britain's revolutionary decade, 1649-1660
No full textEvents moved with giddying speed in the 1650s. After the public execution of Charles I, ‘dangerous’ monarchy was abolished and the House of Lords was dismissed. These revolutionary acts sent shock waves across the kingdom and the continent. They set in motion a decade of bewildering change and instability for the new republic, under the leadership of the soldier-statesman Oliver Cromwell. But amid the tumult came innovation and opportunity. Previously unthinkable ideas about sovereignty and liberty were debated and implemented. The Quakers were formed, Jews lived and worshipped freely, and philosophers talked radical politics in coffee houses. Ordinary men and women devoured the first newspapers, and experimental scientists scrutinised the world in wholly new ways. England’s unique and distinctive republican experiment may have been short-lived, but it changed the course of British history. It transformed the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland, reset the compact between the monarch and the people, and re-fashioned the story the British told — and continue to tell — about themselves. It is often said that Britain is not suited temperamentally to a republic. But, as this book vividly demonstrates, this country’s institutions and political life are rooted in its republican past. <br/
The Tudor coronation ceremonies in history and criticism
No full textThe coronation was one of the most important – and scrutinised – ceremonies of a Tudor monarch's reign. Five coronations took place in sixteenth-century England, but there is currently no comprehensive history of these ceremonies. Criticism has tended to focus on coronation processions, divorcing them from the sacred service they precede and often presenting them as exercises in royal propaganda. The story of the Tudor coronations has also been co-opted as part of the more general history of the Protestantisation of ceremonies: the emptying out of ceremony is assumed. But the Tudor coronations remained significant throughout the sixteenth century, and their relationship with power and legitimacy troubled contemporaries far more than has been sometimes been claimed. Revisionist histories now consider continuity as well as change. They treat power as less centralised and less coherent, and recognise the persistence of the idea of sacred monarchy. As such, they demand that we look again at the coronations in all their religious, political and symbolic complexity. This article offers a brief account of the Tudor coronations and the place that state ceremonies have occupied in recent and past criticism. It also suggests how future research might build on a fresh understanding of the role of ceremonies in early modern England
Reforming tradition: the coronations of Mary and Elizabeth
No full textThis book brings together a selection of recent, cutting-edge research which, for the first time, challenges commonplace arguments about Mary and Elizabeth's relative successes or failures in order to rethink Tudor queenship
The monarchical republic of Mary I
No full textIn his celebrated 1987 essay, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Patrick Collinson wrote that ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which also happened to be a monarchy: or vice versa.’ Since then, the idea of an Elizabethan ‘monarchical republic’ has been tested, challenged, and developed, with precedents found in Henry VIII's and Edward VI's reigns. Mary I's reign has not, however, been considered for its contribution to the debates. Yet, in 1553, the unique circumstances of Mary's accession as England's first queen regnant, who was also still legally a bastard, exacerbated sixteenth-century anxieties about monarchical authority, and about the correct relationship between a monarch and parliament. Prior to Mary's coronation, her council put forward an unprecedented proposal: they wanted parliament to sit before Mary was anointed and crowned queen. This article explores this proposal, in conjunction with two texts, Richard Taverner's An oration gratulatory made upon the joyfull proclayming of the moste noble Princes Quene Mary Quene of Englande and the play Respublica, to argue that, at the beginning of her reign, significant pressure was put on Mary to rule her country as a ‘monarchical republic’.<br/
Les mémoires républicaines des guerres civiles anglaises dans les années 1650
No full textIn 1649, Charles I of England was executed, following seven years of civil war. England became a republic and then, under Oliver Cromwell, a Protectorate. In 1660, the republican experiment collapsed and Charles ii was restored to the throne. Post-1660 commentators reiterated the “abhorrences” and the “wild and deformed chaos” of the recent past. But not all chose to remember the wars in this way. Some interpreted them as evidence of “Gods mercies.” Historians have focused lately on Restoration memories of England’s “troubles,” but this article considers how men and women living in the 1650s, under the republic, wroteabout their very recent and bloody past. It looks beyond authorized or traditional “histories” to show how memories of the wars are embedded in all kinds of writing from this turbulent decade, from prophecies to poems. It argues that the need to understand the wars was widespread, that the scars ran deep, and that the horror and loss were shared as much by those at the heart of the new regime, as by those who lived quietly under it
The king in the parliamentary debates of 1657
No full textIn the spring of 1657, Parliament formally offered Oliver Cromwell the title of king. As is well known, Cromwell refused the title, after much deliberation and searching of his conscience. This essay tracks the word ‘king’ through the great business of the offer of the crown that defined the year of 1657, beginning with the debates in Parliament. It then traces ‘king’ through the records of the several meetings that took place between Cromwell and the committee of ninety-nine MPs, charged with the task of persuading Cromwell. While the kingship crisis of 1657 and its outcome are well known, the ways in which contemporaries understood and defined ‘king’ are worth closer scrutiny. The parliamentary debates of 1657 put such intense pressure on the word that we are able to witness it being pulled apart, and recast in a different mould
' "All forms accustomed": ritual, precedent and the past at the coronation of Charles II'
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