Citizens within Subjects:
Political Rights and Participation in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
2003 - 2004
ABSTRACTS
WORKSHOP I: Political and Civic Consciousness - 6 December 2003
Organised by Jessica Winston (Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow)
Humanity Manse G1, 1:00-5:00 pm
Michelle O’Callaghan (Oxford Brookes):
"To combine and make parties in parliament": the politics
of sociability in the early seventeenth century
The quote in the title comes from a document that Bacon put together around 1613 to convince James that it was safe to call a new parliament, particularly given that the 'opposite party heretofore is now dissolved and broken’ and that measures can be taken ’to make men perceive that it is not safe to combine and make parties in Parliament’. The paper will look at the way that associational activity in the Commons is related to habits of ’combining’ or ’commoning’ fostered at the Inns of Court, and manifested in the Inns of Court tavern societies of the early seventeenth century. It is part of a broader enquiry into the notion of a civil society, and the way that the emergent professional identity of the gentleman lawyer goes hand-in-hand with the increasing institutional self-confidence of the House of Commons.
Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway, London):
"One man except": Milton and the multitude
Perhaps the most influential way of conceptualising civic participation in the early modern period was the republican. However, this model was also exclusive in several different ways—often anti-democratic (or, at least, anti-populist), anti-feminist, and anti-commercial. There was thus always the potential for conflict between republican values and other demands such as, for example, sexual equality. This paper examines the theoretical basis for such conflicts before illustrating how they were played out in the writings of the seventeenth-century classical republican, John Milton.
Andrew McRae (Exeter):
Vox Populi: politics and the polity in the unauthorised texts of early
Stuart England
In recent years, a number of scholars have identified, in the wealth of manuscript libels and unauthorized pamphlets that circulated in the early Stuart decades, evidence of a new degree of popular political engagement. Such texts, with their scurrilous and licentious approach to political figures and issues, seem to offer evidence of voices which have otherwise been erased from the historical record. My paper will begin by surveying and critically assessing some of these arguments, especially in the light of my own research into early Stuart manuscript culture. The ’voice of the people’ becomes a considerably more complicated notion under such analysis. Subsequently, I will examine the ways in which popular political engagement is represented in the texts themselves. How, I will ask, did the authors of these texts construct ’popular’ political voices? What role did they conceive for their writing in the arena of power? And how did they perceive the relation between writing and action?
Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck, London):
Gender, politics and symbolic language in the Civil War crisis
The first part of the paper looks at the conceptualisation of women’s relationship to politics in the seventeenth century England more generally and in the light of that the second half examines the vexed question of how, indeed whether, highly sexualised languages of rule can be understood as (a) linked to the crisis in the sense of being new (b) expressive of that crisis of rule.
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