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The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics.
Richard Culmer – the famous Canterbury iconoclast – shares certain characteristics with the well-known Presbyterian preacher from the civil wars, Thomas Edwards. Both were controversial ministers, and both became involved in the world of print culture and pamphleteering. With both men, however, there has always been a danger that the printed pamphlets are studied in order to reconstruct their lives and ideas, or the beliefs and activities of those that they studied, in ways which left unanswered questions about the role that print played within their careers, and the ways in which they thought about its uses. Of course, pioneering work by Ann Hughes has helped to revolutionise our understanding of the print revolution, and the innovative ways in which Edwards appropriated print as part of mobilisation strategies. This piece revisits the texts produced by and about both Richard Culmer and his son, in order to deepen our understanding of the nature, practices and role of polemic during the civil wars and interregnum, not least in relation to the ways in which pamphlets deployed evidence in order to mould reputations, and did so in ways that might be thought to have resonated – perhaps in different ways – both nationally and in the locality.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
This book aims to revisit the county study as a way into understanding the dynamics of the English civil war during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a ‘county community’. It investigates the responses of the county’s governing elite and puritan religious establishment to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I’s Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of the petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire during 1641-42. This important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English Revolution.
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly argued polemic or through imaginative storytelling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grassroots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal–human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal–human history.
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
, collecting and the pamphlet culture of seventeenth century England’ in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds) Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 201–216; T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1996); and A. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK, 1997). 234 Conclusion 4 B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London, 1979). 5 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), p. 413. 6 C
selfless as he proclaimed. Not only did his work as an agent for the Poor Clares allow Blundell to control a patronage network lending money out to individuals at preferential rates but recognition of the vital work that he did for the order aided his negotiations to keep his daughters’ annuities as low as possible. Finally, Blundell addressed issues concerning Catholics in a printed pamphlet and letters disseminated amongst members of his networks. In turn his arguments helped inform the works of Roger L’Estrange and were recycled in a letter written by Roger Bradshaigh
in Algiers, Tunis, and Malta; ambassadorial correspondence from Istanbul; correspondence and records of the city of Marseille; records of the Chambre de commerce de Marseille; papers of the admiral des mers de Levant; correspondence of the Knights of Malta; and other manuscripts.11 Many of these sources concern southern France in particular, but printed pamphlets, treatises, and rare books provide additional insights into the dynamics of raiding throughout early modern France.12 Although there is not space here to fully explore all of these sources, early modern