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Arrest on civil process, especially for debt, became an increasingly important motif in late Elizabethan and early Stuart literature, especially Jacobean drama. In the second half of the sixteenth century, rates of litigation skyrocketed, arrest on first instance became common, and a series of bankruptcy acts exacerbated the inequities of debt proceedings. Moreover, the crown’s efforts to mitigate problems of imprisonment for debt made arrest a flashpoint between competing movements for legal reform. In these contexts, dramatists paid new attention to arrest practices, regularly representing them as illegitimate and open to abuse. The motif of arrest for debt had particular power in dramatic works because the legal act itself was inherently performative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Joshua Mark Rodda reconsiders the early seventeenth-century English Church by way of four dialogues, written by the young conformist Oliver Ormerod and the wayward preacher Henoch Clapham. Within four years, in the first decade of the reign of James I, Ormerod and Clapham each produced a dialogue disputing puritan separation, followed by a matching anti-Catholic work. In their use of form and character, these dialogues demonstrate how the contemporary conscience navigated an unstable settlement, how confessional identity was constructed through encounters with the religious "other," and how the language of moderation was used to characterize and understand the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides one of the first studies of two late works by George Chapman, “Pro Vere” (1622) and “A iustification of a strange action of Nero” (1629). Through a close examination of these works, and through situating Chapman’s texts alongside other neglected works of the 1620s that voiced opposition to the Stuart court and kings, the article examines the critical and subversive role that classical history and gendered language played in forging ideological conflict in England during the Stuart period. More broadly, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of studying imaginative writings for understanding Stuart political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two events, both labelled massacres by the English who suffered death at the hands of their rivals, took place within the space of a year on opposite sides of the globe and in widely different overseas contexts. The first episode took place in Virginia in March 1622, when Opechancanough and his soldiers killed one-third of the English colonists in a surprise attack. The second episode transpired in February 1623 in the Spice Islands, when Dutch East India Company officials in Ambon suspected English East India Company employees of conspiring with Japanese soldiers to seize the trading post, interrogated and tried them, and executed twenty-one men. This episode, known in England by 1624 as the ' Amboyna massacre', endured as a meaningful frame of reference well into the eighteenth century. This article explores the particular contexts of each episode and analyses what violence meant to different participants. It investigates how each event became a 'massacre' to survivors and to observers in England. In both Virginia and Amboyna, the English were victims, not perpetrators, of violence, and thus these events offer an opportunity to explore how victims of violence deployed their ordeals, in pamphlets, images, plays, and songs, to further their own ends. Labelled as massacres, these two episodes acquired a meaning apart from the actual course of events, helping the English to reassess their overseas goals, to re-evaluate their prospects and to define themselves anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses the political career of Sir Edward Dering (d. 1644), a prominent but extremely controversial MP during the Long Parliament, who has fascinated historians because of the way in which he appears to have ‘defected’ from the cause of political and religious reform, who was eventually expelled from the Commons for publishing his parliamentary speeches, and who briefly flirted with royalism before making a humiliating return to Westminster. It does so by focusing upon his relationship with the public, in terms of how he courted popular support in order to secure election, and how people followed his subsequent parliamentary career, not least through the circulation of scribal and printed texts. It highlights how constituents (and others) responded to such activity, not least by making clear what policies he was expected to promote, thereby revealing that Dering's career was driven not just by his own political and religious views, but also by ideas about his role as an MP, and about his relationship with his constituents. Dering thus provides a rare opportunity to scrutinize the dynamic relationships between MPs and the public, thereby revealing hitherto neglected evidence about transformations in political culture and ideas regarding representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the political crisis in early Stuart England. Influence of common lawyer, Sir Edward Coke on the 1620 crisis; Impact of disagreements among civil lawyers on Stuart churchmen; Dispute over Coke's treatment of Commissioners of Sewers; Implication of the Petition of Right to common law.

Reviews the first histories of early Stuart England. Reviews the intensive examination by a group of scholars in the mid-1970s of the Whiggish interpretation of early Stuart politics; More.

Focuses on the rise of litigations in England in 1550-1640. Association of the litigation's rise with the breakdown in societal relations; Rise in litigations due to matters concerning credit and contracts; Consideration of community relations and reconciliation under litigations functionality.

Reports that news pamphlets were used to circulate news between 1513 and 1640 in Great Britain. Description of the pamphlets; Reference to the book `A History of News from the Drum to the Satellite,' by Mitchell Stephens; Details on `The Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Ireland and Scotland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640.'