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The book discusses the 'state trial' as a legal process, a public
spectacle, and a point of political conflict - a key part of how
constitutional monarchy became constitutional. State trials
provided some of the leading media events of later Stuart England.
The more important of these trials attracted substantial public
attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the
state and its subjects. Later Stuart England has been known among
legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries asserted
their independence from judges. In political history, the
government's sometimes shaky control over political trials in this
period has long been taken as a sign of the waning power of the
Crown. This book revisits the process by which the 'state trial'
emerged as a legal proceeding, a public spectacle, a point of
political conflict, and ultimately, a new literary genre. It
investigates the trials as events, as texts, and as moments in the
creation of historical memory. By the early nineteenth century, the
publication and republication of accounts of the state trials had
become a standard part of the way in which modern Britons imagined
how their constitutional monarchy had superseded the absolutist
pretensions of the Stuart monarchs. This book explores how the
later Stuart state trials helped to create that world.
On a winter night in 1743, a local magistrate was stabbed to death
in the churchyard of Rye by an angry butcher. Why did this gruesome
crime happen? What does it reveal about the political, economic,
and cultural patterns that existed in this small English port town?
To answer these questions, this fascinating book takes us back to
the mid-sixteenth century, when religious and social tensions began
to fragment the quiet town of Rye and led to witch hunts, riots,
and violent political confrontations. Paul Monod examines events
over the course of the next two centuries, tracing the town's
transition as it moved from narrowly focused Reformation norms to
the more expansive ideas of the emerging commercial society. In the
process, relations among the town's inhabitants were fundamentally
altered. The history of Rye mirrored that of the whole nation, and
it gives us an intriguing new perspective on England in the early
modern period.
In the sixteenth century, the kings of Europe were like gods to
their subjects. Within 150 years, however, this view of monarchs
had altered dramatically: a king was the human, visible sign of the
rational state. How did such a momentous shift in political
understanding come about? This sweeping book explores the changing
cultural significance of the power of European kings from the
assassination of France's Henry III to the death of Louis XIV. Paul
Kleber Monod draws on political history, political philosophy,
anthropology, sociology, and literature to understand the
relationship between kings and their political subjects and the
interplay between monarchy and religion. He also makes use of 35
paintings and statues to illuminate the changing public images of
kings. Discussing monarchies throughout Europe, from Britain to
Russia, Monod tells how sixteenth-century kings and queens were
thought to heal the sick with a touch, were mediators between
divine authority and the Christian self in quasi-religious
ceremonies, and were seen as ideal mirrors of human identity. By
1715, the sacred authority of the monarchy had been supplanted by
an ideology fusing internal moral responsibility with external
obedience to an abstract political authority. Subjects were
expected to identify not with a sacred king but with the natural
person of the ruler. No longer divine, the kings and queens of the
Enlightenment took up a new, more human place in the hearts and
minds of their subjects.
Jacobitism, or support for the exiled Stuarts after the Revolution
of 1688, has become a topic of great interest in recent years.
Historians have debated its influence on Parliamentary politics,
but none has yet attempted to explore its broader implications in
English society. Paul Monod's study offers a wide-ranging analysis
of every aspect of Jacobite activity, from pamphlets and newspapers
to songs, cartoons, riots, seditious words, clubs and armed
insurrection. It argues that Jacobitism was not confined to a tiny
group of fanatical reactionaries, and that it had a profound impact
on various aspects of English life, including political thought,
literature, popular culture, religion and elite sociability. It
contributed a great deal both to the emergence of conservative
attitudes in eighteenth-century England and to the development of a
radical critique of Whig government. This paradoxical legacy makes
Jacobitism a subject of considerable and enduring significance in
English political, social and cultural history.
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