This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops o... more This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologet...
abstract:D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relatio... more abstract:D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relationship to republican ideas during the "second" reign of Elizabeth I (ca. 1585–1603). Although Andrew Hadfield has argued that the play "contains many of the characteristics of republicanism," Lodge's marked skepticism toward Machiavellian-inspired military-humanist values suggests a more ambiguous relationship with early modern republicanism. Lodge was less the "republican," as Hadfield has asserted, than the Catholic, articulating a "civic Catholicism" in which the public observances and rituals of the "old religion" played an integral role in the maintenance of public morality, civil order, and justice.
This article considers James VI and I's treatise on the divine right of kings, The Trew Law o... more This article considers James VI and I's treatise on the divine right of kings, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in relation to his earlier treatise on witchcraft Daemonologie (1597). James's articulation of divine right kingship not only served to refute the arguments of his former tutor, George Buchanan (1506–1582), and the Jesuit, Robert Persons (1546–1610), but also served as a bulwark against the perceived threat of the supernatural to his rule. James incorporated the ideal of a stoic subject previously put forward in his Daemonologie into the Trew Law, offering a doctrine of non-resistance that both Catholic and presbyterian subjects were expected to follow. The ideal stoic subject would remain firmly in command of their passions, enduring the ‘curses’ of tyranny or of witchcraft without actively seeking relief for their circumstances.
... Furthermore, even prior to the writings of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth ... more ... Furthermore, even prior to the writings of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth ... ing of James's own views in the Basilicon Doron and the Trew Law of Free ... History, Literature, and Theory, 15001800 derives from papers presented to an interdisciplinary conference held ...
The tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland... more The tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the seventeenth century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English-speaking world.1 Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very ‘written-ness’ has suggested them as important precursors to the United States Constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the eighteenth century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process of governance as the printed and written word. In seventeenth-century England, the notion of a uniform and univocal constitutional order, a constitution speaking with a single authoritative voice, defining and delimiting the...
This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops o... more This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologet...
abstract:D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relatio... more abstract:D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relationship to republican ideas during the "second" reign of Elizabeth I (ca. 1585–1603). Although Andrew Hadfield has argued that the play "contains many of the characteristics of republicanism," Lodge's marked skepticism toward Machiavellian-inspired military-humanist values suggests a more ambiguous relationship with early modern republicanism. Lodge was less the "republican," as Hadfield has asserted, than the Catholic, articulating a "civic Catholicism" in which the public observances and rituals of the "old religion" played an integral role in the maintenance of public morality, civil order, and justice.
This article considers James VI and I's treatise on the divine right of kings, The Trew Law o... more This article considers James VI and I's treatise on the divine right of kings, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in relation to his earlier treatise on witchcraft Daemonologie (1597). James's articulation of divine right kingship not only served to refute the arguments of his former tutor, George Buchanan (1506–1582), and the Jesuit, Robert Persons (1546–1610), but also served as a bulwark against the perceived threat of the supernatural to his rule. James incorporated the ideal of a stoic subject previously put forward in his Daemonologie into the Trew Law, offering a doctrine of non-resistance that both Catholic and presbyterian subjects were expected to follow. The ideal stoic subject would remain firmly in command of their passions, enduring the ‘curses’ of tyranny or of witchcraft without actively seeking relief for their circumstances.
... Furthermore, even prior to the writings of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth ... more ... Furthermore, even prior to the writings of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth ... ing of James's own views in the Basilicon Doron and the Trew Law of Free ... History, Literature, and Theory, 15001800 derives from papers presented to an interdisciplinary conference held ...
The tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland... more The tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the seventeenth century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English-speaking world.1 Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very ‘written-ness’ has suggested them as important precursors to the United States Constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the eighteenth century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process of governance as the printed and written word. In seventeenth-century England, the notion of a uniform and univocal constitutional order, a constitution speaking with a single authoritative voice, defining and delimiting the...
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