This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's ...life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.
This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant ...life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants, as well as the personal dynamics of subjective change,Life history illuminates how migrants' 'recompose' the self in response to the transition between cultures and places. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geographyThis book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants, as well as the personal dynamics of subjective change,Life history illuminates how migrants' 'recompose' the self in response to the transition between cultures and places. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography
A recovery of the revealing poetic and political commentary produced by the Imperial poet laureate Nicolaus Mameranus for the court of Mary Tudor during the visit of her husband, Philip II of Spain, ...in 1557.
The making of the United Kingdom in 1707 is still a matter of significant political and historical controversy. Allan Macinnes here offers a major interpretation that sets the Act of Union within a ...broad European and colonial context and provides a comprehensive picture of its transatlantic and transoceanic ramifications that ranged from the balance of power to the balance of trade. He reexamines English motivations from a colonial as well as a military perspective and assesses the imperial significance of the creation of the United Kingdom. He also explores afresh the commitment of some determined Scots to secure Union for political, religious and opportunist reasons and shows that rather than an act of statesmanship, the resultant Treaty of Union was the outcome of politically inept negotiations by the Scots. Union and Empire will be a major contribution to the history of Britain, empire and early modern state formation.
A survey of the life, historical and political impacts, and textual sources associated with the early medieval English missionary and church reformer Boniface, who was active in the eighth century in ...what is today Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
From the 1890s onwards, social reformers, volunteer lawyers, and
politicians increasingly came to see access to affordable or free
legal advice as a critical part of helping working-class people
...uphold their rights with landlords, employers, and retailers - and,
from the 1940s, with the welfare state. Whilst a state scheme was
launched in 1949, it was never fully implemented and help from a
lawyer remained out of the reach of many people. Lawyers for
the poor is the first full-length study of the development of
voluntary action and mutual schemes to make the law more
accessible, and the pressure put on the legal profession and
governments to bring in further reforms. It offers new insights of
the role of access to the law in shaping ideas about citizenship
and civil rights in the twentieth century.
This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of ...case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.
This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement,
demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and
seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John
Foxe, whose ...influential Acts and Monuments (1563)
reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and
model subjects, portraying them as Protestants' ideological
forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical
lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical
church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument,
revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe's text
allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the
lollards as historical validation of their own theological and
political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who
were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century
would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.
By the early nineteenth century England was very different economically from its continental neighbours. It was wealthier, growing more rapidly, more heavily urbanised, and far less dependent upon ...agriculture. A generation ago it was normal to attribute these differences to the 'industrial revolution' and to suppose that this was mainly the product of recent change, but no longer. Current estimates suggest only slow growth during the period from 1760–1840. This implies that the economy was much larger and more advanced by 1760 than had previously been supposed and suggests that growth in the preceding century or two must have been decisive in bringing about the 'divergence' of England. Sir E. A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial Britain, here examines the issues which arise in this connection from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Those convicted of homicide were hanged on the public gallows before being dissected under the Murder Act in Georgian England. Yet, from 1752, whether criminals actually died on the hanging tree or ...in the dissection room remained a medical mystery in early modern society. Dissecting the Criminal Corpse takes issue with the historical cliché of corpses dangling from the hangman's rope in crime studies. Some convicted murderers did survive execution in early modern England. Establishing medical death in the heart-lungs-brain was a physical enigma. Criminals had large bull-necks, strong willpowers, and hearty survival instincts. Extreme hypothermia often disguised coma in a prisoner hanged in the winter cold. The youngest and fittest were capable of reviving on the dissection table. Many died under the lancet. Capital legislation disguised a complex medical choreography that surgeons staged. They broke the Hippocratic Oath by executing the Dangerous Dead across England from 1752 until 1832. This book is open access under a CC-BY license.
