Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern EnglandUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 M05 29 - 224 páginas In 1352 King Edward III had expanded the legal definition of treason to include the act of imagining the death of the king, opening up the category of "constructive" treason, in which even a subject's thoughts might become the basis for prosecution. By the sixteenth century, treason was perceived as an increasingly serious threat and policed with a new urgency. Referring to the extensive early modern literature on the subject of treason, Imaginary Betrayals reveals how and to what extent ideas of proof and grounds for conviction were subject to prosecutorial construction during the Tudor period. Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with having had sexual relations with two men before her marriage; the 1586 case of Anthony Babington and twelve confederates, accused of plotting with the Spanish to invade England and assassinate Elizabeth; and the prosecution in the same year of Mary, Queen of Scots, indicted for conspiring with Babington to engineer her own accession to the throne. |
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... accused had pled guilty, employed circuit judges and preachers to provide official accounts of traitors' misdeeds and convictions, and published pamphlets.1 In explaining these events, scholars have tended to identify treason more with ...
... accused. Until recently, literary scholars have tended to enclose the issue of the relations between plays and trials within biographies of authors. We have, for example, studies of what William Shakespeare knew and treatises on his ...
... accused of seeking to supplant one ideal of a homeland with another. He or she is brought into being by a dominant culture and is positioned as one who implicitly contests an ideal of nationhood as natural, unified, and self-defining ...
... accused of treason was to be at the receiving end of a terrifying exercise of government power, and this inequitable relationship makes it tempting to ally the law with the instrumental purposes of absolutist mon— archies. Since the ...
... accused could be found guiltyoftreason.30 The kings lawyers justified these prosecutions in the late fifteenth century on the grounds of intention: such things as approving of a sermon, crying out commentaries about the king's personal ...
Contenido
1 | |
Imagining the Realm | 23 |
2 Female Fidelities on Trial | 40 |
3 Masculinity Affiliation and Rootlessness | 77 |
4 Secrecy and the Epistolary Self | 110 |
Conclusion | 141 |
Notes | 145 |
Works Cited | 187 |
Index | 203 |
Acknowledgments | 215 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early ... Karen Cunningham Vista previa limitada - 2002 |
Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early ... Karen Cunningham Sin vista previa disponible - 2002 |