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Why study petitioning? The last chapter reviewed some traditional ways of mobilizing citizens through a door-to-door knock or a telephone call. Even though traditional methods remain important, as the prominence of social media in the 2017 General Election campaign shows, digital forms of communication are now dominant as the ways of carrying out a whole range of personal and group activities linked to community action, and are a natural route for people to get involved in politics. Mobilization through the internet is powerful because of its
… all these petitions for a translation, both of Church and State, with so little fear of the Halter, that they would thinke themselves neglected, if they had not thanks for their care for the Re-publicke; only he that desires the ratification of an old Law, or of a long setled Eccelsiastick Government, looked as if the Halter were his share. 1 This Royalist commentary on the Parliamentarian petitioning of 1640–2 in support of first ‘Root and Branch’ reform
THEORY AND PRACTICE A great deal of parliamentary time was spent dealing with petitions, both from its own members and also from individuals or groups of non-members. 1 For instance, in the period between the outbreak of the rebellion in autumn 1641 and the effective dissolution of parliament in summer 1648 just one piece of legislation passed, and the representative nature of parliament was severely reduced by the fact that most of the territory of the island of Ireland was in the hands of rebels of varying religious or political outlooks. 2 During such
6 Petitioning and the search for settlement T he Long Parliament opened with the ‘Patriots’ of the Booth–Wilbraham group who had supported Brereton and Venables in the parliamentary election for the shire re-established as the dominant group in county affairs. That situation did not last long, however, disappearing in a process of ideological and political polarisation that took place simultaneously at Westminster and in the county itself. Religion was the catalyst, in particular, radical puritan plans for further reformation and the reaction to those plans
2 The Crown and the secular magic of petition Historiographical interest in ‘loyalism’, whether radical or conservative, has tended to reduce the problem of agency to a debate over whether patriotism was organic or imposed from above. Because the mentalités of the loyal have not been rediscovered beyond this point, little notice has been taken of the sheer forwardness and self-assertiveness of many subjects in their dealings with the throne. What was it, for example, that permitted even lower-class women to address the monarch with a confidence they might never
This article explores the process of female self-fashioning in two previously neglected petitions dated 1786-87 by using signatures to analyse their texts and construct their contexts. In them, Helen Timberlake revises the account of frontier and Cherokee life her husband, Henry Timberlake, had published in his Memoirs (1765). Her intense maternal voice, focused on loss, entangles her history with that of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, providing a grounded but often untrue narrative of shared family life and a persona tailored to evoke a history intertwined with that of George III. This article explores the mystery of Helen Timberlakes origins, while connecting the rhetoric of her petitions to the gendered emergence of sentimentalism, narratives of Indian captivity, and the historiography of ‘the Atlantic’.
redress with their local magistrate, travel to Beijing’s centre to petition the court bureaucracy directly; some persistent souls even managed to carry their petitions to the Emperor himself. A version of this system exists still, though those who pursue petitions in today’s China rarely secure justice, becoming locked instead into a Kafkaesque proceeding which often seems to demand and encourage a sort of monomania. As in imperial times, petitioners will often arrive in Beijing from hundreds or thousands of miles away, having been frustrated by local, official channels
This article on an early modern pamphlet which can be found in the John Rylands Library Special Collections asserts the importance of John Goodwin’s analysis of Zechariah 13:3 in A Post-Script or Appendix to […] Hagiomastix (1647). I argue that this pamphlet’s significance is not only its emphasis on toleration, but also that it is a striking example of Judaeo-centric millenarian thought in which Zechariah 12–14 is understood as prophesying a future time in which the Jews will be restored to the Land of Israel. I also analyse the pamphlet’s relationship to supersessionism and compare Goodwin’s interpretation with those of Samuel Rutherford, William Prynne, John Owen and, in particular, Jean Calvin. I explain that Goodwin’s use of the analogy of Scripture hermeneutic helps to explain his belief in Judaeo-centric eschatology. I then show how one of Goodwin’s followers, Daniel Taylor, used Judaeo-centric biblical exegesis to petition Oliver Cromwell for Jewish readmission to England.
forms of violence experienced by this population could be overcome by the power of recovery they possess as individuals. Therefore, some displaced people reinterpret the violence suffered as occasions to learn a life lesson: When we arrived at the Retoños corporation, they taught us to use a computer … before the displacement, one ignores many things … One goes to claim our rights from the government … and the civil clerk begins to ask us for a photocopy of the ID, the photocopy of the right of petition and at the end one does not know anything. Little by little