This essay explores the significance of genealogy and inheritance in Shakespeare’s history plays; specifically, the idea that national and racial characteristics were passed down through the generations in the blood. The word "race" is often applied to peoples produced by the intermingling of different lineages and with different characteristics. The essay shows that such issues were important not just for royal dynasties but for the people they ruled, as is demonstrated through readings of King Henry V, King Richard II, and King John. When races are imagined in such ways the word "bastard" assumes particular importance, as the progeny of two different people(s) taking on new characteristics from a combination of those of the parents. Shakespeare demonstrates in his English history plays that nations and races are never pure, but are always intermingled, compromised, revitalized, and constantly transformed by their union with other peoples, especially the neighbours in terms of whom they define themselves.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of fish and fishing in early modern England. Fish and fisheries were vital to the early modern economy. The presence of fish stocks not only explains the location of a large number of population centres, but disputes over fishing rights were responsible for many major conflicts and wars in the period. Fishing also had therapeutic and symbolic significance, angling becoming ever more important as a means of escaping the tensions of modern life as the seventeenth century progressed and, especially for writers inclined to the Royalist position after the turbulent years of the Commonwealth, a means of getting back in touch with a more ordered, simple, and sedate society. Fish were especially good at connecting man to nature, as they were assumed to be natural products or elements rather than animals with feelings. And, of course, fish and fishing feature prominently in Christian symbolism. So it is hardly surprising that there is significant comment about the varieties of native fish and modes of fishing in Drayton's chorographical poem. This chapter will chart Drayton’s representation of fish in his poetry in relation to economic writings, husbandry manuals as well as other poetry. Drayton's literal and allegorical exploration of the significance of fish in the early modern world is part of a distinctive ecological vision which includes, unusually for a writer in the early seventeenth century, reflections on sustainability. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I will examine representations of sea fish and fishing and show how Drayton makes use of what his contemporaries wrote and suggest how he influenced them in turn. In the second, I will explore contemporary representations of freshwater fishing, in order to show how Drayton resembled and differed from other writers in his extensive comments on fishing in Poly-Olbion in the third section.

Fish were such a cheap and plentiful foodstuff that William Cecil, as Secretary of State and anxious of challenges to English fishing, launched a plan to impose an extra fish day (Wednesday) to protect the industry.

This chapter will explore the relationship between the clergy and the military in late sixteenth-century Ireland. Connections to religious teaching and ritual were vital for early modern armies, yet these links remain underexplored in works on military culture of the period. The Erasmian Militis Christiani tradition has often been invoked to explain Christian attitudes, particularly in studies of an assertive proselytising culture prevalent from the late Middle Ages onwards, but it is relatively infrequently applied in terms of actual military service and identity. As this chapter demonstrates, the clergy played two principal roles in martial culture: justifying military action in sermons; and accompanying armies in order to carry out the normal duties of clergymen, which included preaching to the officers and men. In return, the army provided those clergy who were prepared to serve it with ample reward.

In the first part of this chapter we will look at the careers of clergymen who served the military in Ireland and, in the second part, examine sermons delivered prior to military action. We will concentrate principally on the career of Meredith Hanmer (1544/5–1604), a chaplain to military governors in Ireland who also had a distinguished career as a translator and polemicist. Hanmer is an especially interesting case because of the wealth of information about his life that remains and, extrapolating from his example, we are able to reconstruct how clergymen behaved in times of conflict and participated in martial culture. Hanmer's career suggests that clergymen were pragmatic, prepared to adapt their service and knowledge according to the situation in which they found themselves. The second half of this chapter will concentrate on sermons, the principal extant material that enables us to reconstruct the intimate and vital relationship between clergymen and military men. We will analyse a number of military sermons, in particular, Lancelot Andrewes’ sermon preached before Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex's expedition to Ireland in 1599. We will look at the rhetoric Andrewes employed, including his adoption of the tradition of the Militis Christiani, as well as his warning to his congregation that there had to be a clear distinction between true Christians and those in thrall to Satan.

Nations are central to Hegel's understanding of history. For Hegel, writing in 1821-31, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, nations are individual and distinct entities expressing the particular spirit of a particular people. This spirit needs to be realised so a people will struggle to activate their spirit and to manifest it in a concrete manner. For Hegel it is the process that matters: the nation is at its most vigorous and distinct when it is working to establish its true identity. Once the nation has come into existence it starts to grow, wane and even die. Of course, established nations still have much to offer and do not just disappear once they have appeared. They can, as Hegel's argument continues, still accomplish much in war and peace, conflict and resolution, through their interaction with other nations.