The social reality of the merchant community of King’s Lynn played an integral role in the formation of Margery Kempe’s self-image throughout her life. In her young-formative years, Lynn’s merchant elite imparted personal, commercial, ethical, and religious values. As the daughter of John Brunham, one of the most influential members of Lynn’s elite, the merchant community also provided Margery with status, security, comfort, and self-worth. Even in her later years as Margery formulated her holy self-image as she questioned, and eventually rejected, the role imposed on her by Lynn’s merchant culture as the daughter of Brunham and wife of John Kempe, she continued to identify herself through that culture. When asked by the mayor of Leicester in 1416 or 1417 to identify herself, Margery confidently replied, “Sir, I am of Lynn of Norfolk, a good man’s daughter of the same Lynn, who had been mayor five time of that worshipful borough and alderman also many years, and I have a good man, also a burgess of the said town, Lynn, as my husband.”

Ever since J. H. Plumb published his Ford Lectures, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1679-1725 (1966), the topic of political stability has gripped the attention of England’s early modern historians. In particular Plumb’s characterization of the politics of 1679-1722 as “The Rage of Party” was refined by Geoffrey Holmes, whose British Politics in the Age of Anne ushered in a variety of studies of political warfare in what has come to be known as The First Age of Party. These and succeeding works have elaborated and confirmed the existence of deep and severe differences between Whig and Tory partisans, differences renewing animosities extending back to the Civil Wars and generating a self-perpetuating struggle for power. The consequences of this “rage of party” for the formation and execution of policy were daunting. In particular party rage placed three important restrictions on the executive’s room for maneuver. By rendering all political alliances unstable, partisanship limited the ability of the governments of William and Anne to operate as combinations of the parties. Partisanship also put all government servants under the constant threat of defending their conduct from year to year. And partisanship dictated certain policy options while frustrating others.

Elizabeth Poole, “the Abingdon prophetess,” makes a brief appearance, often as a footnote, in several standard political histories of the seventeenth century. However, only two attempts seem to have been made to evaluate fully her significance in the politics and religion of the period, one by Professor Firth in his edition of the Clarke Papers and one by the American scholar Dorothy Ludlow in a thesis published in 1978. Firth’s attempt was uncharacteristically superficial, and he limited himself to retailing Royalist propaganda on the subject; while Ludlow, although she brought together much of the available information, was more concerned with Poole as a woman than as a political activist. This article attempts to put her life and public activities into a wider context. It argues that her example shows that it was not impossible for women of the time to function at the highest political levels. What was significant about Poole was her failure to achieve political aims that were not in themselves unrealistic or lacking in influential support. Finally, this article postulates that female political activity at the decision-making levels was limited to a mode that could support or oppose general political strategies but was ill-suited to the furtherance of specific policies or actions.

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his own Principles of Political Economy in 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’s Lectures on Political Economy (1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament in Phases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins posed the question, is a friend a friend because he helps you, or does he help you because he is your friend? Most cultures, Sahlins noted, could choose one of the two. Individuals in Tudor-Stuart Britain, however, would be hard-pressed not to reply, both. Thus, in 1577 after their children’s marriage Sir William Gerard wrote to Moras Wynn of Gwydir that he appreciated Wynn making the match out of “very friendship without respect of gain,” by which Gerard meant affection and goodwill, but went on to add that he understood Wynn now “expected friendship” from him, meaning practical assistance using Gerard’s Court connections. Friendship was both chosen and given, a fortunate accident or a tie strenuously worked for and assiduously cultivated. Ubiquitous and vital, friendship was an act as much as a state of mind: Richard Brathwait spoke to its scope in claiming “there is no greater wilderness than to be without true friends.”

In his Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 Clive Emsley notes that “for England the subject of the middle-class woman ‘kleptomaniac,’ as opposed to the working-class woman ‘thief,’ awaits an historian,” and casts doubt on the significance of the respectable shoplifter in England. However, not only is there ample evidence that middle-class shoplifting was a rising concern in Victorian England, it is a key example of the way in which gender ideology and medical science were constructed to solve a commercial and legal problem. Early in the nineteenth century, a respectable woman accused of shoplifting only had the option of denying her crime and blaming the shopkeeper; however, as the number of middle-class women committing retail crimes such as shoplifting and fraud increased, the issue of representation in the nineteenth century became more complicated. Woman’s role as aggressive consumer and her role in retail crime clashed with her home-centered image. In trials, canting ballads, and scathing articles, critics presented an image of the retail female criminal as greedy, fraudulent, and middle-class. Women fought against this image by denying their crimes or by participating in the creation of the developing representation of criminal women as ill rather than greedy.

Concern over the present state of British history in North American colleges and universities, and more specifically British history of the “Tudor and Stuart” or “Early Modern” era, becomes steadily more intense. Conference panels are devoted to it, on-line conversations frequently indulge in it, and its hard to find an extended conversation amongst colleagues which doesn’t eventually take it up. Much of this may be prompted by the near disappearance of entry-level employment in the field, but this is of course the symptom of far deeper realities. When asked to contribute to a recent colloquium on the state of Early Modern British history in general, I chose to present a North American perspective on the subject. I hoped to affirm that there is such a perspective, and to distinguish it from what I saw as a British perspective. Though the world of ideas may indeed be universal, the worlds of teaching, studying, and academic employment are not. They are peculiar to specific national traditions, educational systems, and cultures.

In 1754 when the London debating societies were non-profit entertainments exclusively for men, the well-known actor Charles Macklin attempted to commercialize and feminize them in one step. Ostensibly the time was ripe for these changes because the popularity of the public debating societies demonstrated their potential profitability and because the exclusion of women from these artisan societies was being seen as out of step with the trend of public entertainment and manifestations of the Enlightenment. The temporary success of Macklin’s British Inquisition documents the readiness of a growing middle class to extend the range of their commercialized leisure; more significantly, the failure of the British Inquisition reveals the hazards of violating male space and trying to gentrify a workingmen’s entertainment in one stroke. Macklin’s ambitious attempt to cash in on the cultural trends of mid-century London merits a place in the study of the commercializing of popular entertainment and the feminizing of masculine entertainments for commercial ends. Its inclusion of women in public debating foreshadows the later participation of women in public debates and the consequent assigning to public culture values previously regarded as feminine, or, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, the “feminization of discourse.” Macklin’s enterprise changed significantly the questions debated at these public meetings. However, the failure of his enterprise shows the difficulty of deliberately attempting to change the character of popular culture and to expand gender conventions exponentially.

This self-promoting editorial in the Star in 1891 made a critical point: labor issues were becoming a standard feature in daily newspapers. Sweating, loopholes in factory legislation, and the famous Dock and Match Girls’ strikes were among the subjects found in the pages of papers such as the Star. This trend in reporting was part of the “New Journalism” that developed in England between the 1880s and 1914. In an attempt to cater to the tastes of mass audiences, there was a shift in emphasis from parliamentary and political news to sports, gossip, crime, and sex. Papers, for instance, reported on the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London. New journalists and editors, like W. T. Stead and Thomas P. O’Connor, also produced interviews, exposes, and political editorials in order to influence public opinion and promote what Stead called “government by journalism.” Stead produced what has been called the most successful piece of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which depicted young girls for sale to older men. Passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for sex to sixteen, was one of its political consequences.

Henry VII’s image as an innately peace-loving, war-loathing monarch was cultivated by his own court poets, repeated by early Tudor chroniclers, and affirmed for posterity by Sir Francis Bacon in his classic history of Henry’s reign. James Gairdner, one of the first of the modern historians of Henry VII, thus regarded Henry VII’s pacificism as a confirmed fact. More recently Joycelyne Russell, in her study of Renaissance peacemaking, posed Henry VII as “a man of peace” in stark contrast to his war-mongering son. Ian Arthurson, however, in an article about Henry’s planned invasion of Scotland in 1497, exposed Henry’s more bellicose side by showing a king intent on prosecuting a war against Scotland to its violent end, even out of proportion to the initial provocation, because at the time that seemed the best means to attain his particular political end. This essay will consider Henry’s inclinations to war and peace with respect to the mediation undertaken in 1490 by Leonello Chieregato, the humanist and bishop of Concordia, and by Antonio Flores, canon of Seville and papal prothonotary, who were charged by Pope Innocent VIII to mediate a peace or a long truce between England and France.

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”