JOURNAL: The Historical Journal LXII (2019), No. 1 (March)

(image source: CUP)

"The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought" (Mark Goldie)

Abstract:

Historians of political thought speak of ‘languages’ of politics. A language provides a lexicon, an available resource for legitimating positions. It is looser than a ‘theory’, because protean, and not predictive of particular doctrines. Some languages attract considerable scholarly attention, while others languish, for all that they were ambient in past cultures. In recent scholarship on early modern European thought, natural law and civic humanism have dominated. Yet prescriptive appeals to national historiographies were equally pervasive. Many European cultures appealed to Tacitean mythologies of a Gothic ur-constitution. The Anglophone variant dwelt on putative Saxon freedoms, the status of the Norman ‘Conquest’, whether feudalism ruptured the Gothic inheritance, and how common law related to ‘reason’, natural law, and divine law. Whigs rooted parliaments in the Saxon witenagemot; though, by the eighteenth century, ‘modern’ Whigs discerned liberty as the fruit of recent socio-economic change. Levellers and Chartists alike talked of liberation from the ‘Norman Yoke’. These themes were explored from the 1940s onwards under the stimulus of Herbert Butterfield; one result was J. G. A. Pocock's classic Ancient constitution and the feudal law (1957).

"Empire and the Right to Preach the Gospel in the School of Salamanca, 1535-1560" (Daniel S. Allemann)

Abstract:

The sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca are well known for their sophisticated reflections on the Spanish conquest of the New World. But the nature of their responses seems far from clear and is subject to historiographical debate. Recent studies from the discipline of intellectual history suggest that the Salmantine theologians challenged the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Americas. Scholars associated with the field of post-colonial studies, on the other hand, forcefully stress their entanglement in Spain's imperial venture overseas. This article, however, argues that these seemingly irreconcilable approaches are not in fact mutually exclusive. It shifts our attention to the sorely neglected ius praedicandi, the right to preach the gospel, which served to translate the Spanish theologians’ deeply rooted belief in the hegemonic truth of the Christian faith into a discourse of otherwise ‘secular’ natural rights. In adopting this novel lens, the article makes a case for assessing the language of the university theologians in its own terms while simultaneously exposing the support of Salamanca for Spain's imperial venture.

Robert Persons, Popular Sovereignty, and the Late Elizabethan Succession Debate (M.JM. Innes)

Abstract:

This article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession at all. After discussing Persons's political thought, this article examines the responses to it by such writers as John Hayward, Henry Constable, Peter Wentworth, and James VI himself. Their turn towards natural law as a basis for James's title was, it is argued, a direct consequence of the Conference’s argument. As well as shining long-overdue light on Hayward's political thought, the article thus argues that the reception of Persons's Conference was a significant influence on the development of English political thought in the early seventeenth century.

"Protestant Military Humanism in Early Stuart England" (D. Alan Orr)

Abstract:

This article addresses the role of Protestant military humanism in early Stuart Ireland. The central argument is that Protestant military humanism as embodied in the works of such authors as Geoffrey Gates (fl. 1566–80) and Barnabe Rich (1541–1617) played a vital role in the Jacobean plantation of Ulster. These authors combined a strong commitment to the Protestant religion with the conviction that martial virtue was essential for the preservation of the commonwealth against the threats of domestic rebellion and foreign domination. The example of the soldier-planter Sir Thomas Phillips of Limavady (c. 1560–1636) and his criticisms of the City of London's plantation in Derry during the 1620s demonstrates that military humanist values not only offered a persuasive rationale for colonization, but also significantly shaped the course of plantation on the ground. Phillips's lengthy conflict with the City of London demonstrated a fundamental disjuncture between his own Protestant military humanist outlook, and the City's own understanding of its civilizing mission in Ireland; however, rather than a conflict between aristocratic and civic values, close study reveals instead a struggle grounded in competing hierarchies of civic values.

"Language and Power in an English Convent in Exile, c. 1621-1631" (Emilie K. M. Murphy)

Abstract:

Scholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter.

"Where was the Church of England, 1646-1660?" (Christopher Haigh)

Abstract:

When parliament abolished episcopacy, cathedrals, and the Book of Common Prayer, what was left of the Church of England? Indeed, as contemporaries asked between 1646 and 1660, ‘Where is the Church of England?’ The episcopalian clergy could not agree. Some thought the remaining national framework of parishes and congregations was ‘the Church of England’, though now deformed, and worked within it. Others thought that only those ministers and parish congregations who remained loyal in heart to the church as it had been qualified as ‘the church’: most of them continued to serve a parish church and tried to keep the old practices going. A third category of hard-liners thought ‘the Church of England’ was now restricted to a recusant community that worshipped with the Prayer Book in secret and rejected the new national profession. The fundamental issue was the nature of a church: was it a society of believers, however organized, or a hierarchical institution following rules prescribed by God? The question caused tensions and distrust among the clergy, and the rigorists thought of the rest as time-servers and traitors. Disagreements continued to divide the clergy after the Restoration, and were reflected in attitudes towards concessions to dissenters.

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