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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... authority was perceived as absolute in some realms and as lim— ited in others. The general concept that rulers received their authority from God extended back at least to the Middle Ages, and as the Tudors strengthened the power of the ...
... authority of the indictment on the basis that it re— lied on statutes that had been repealed; only the 1352 Edwardian statute applied, he argued. But Sergeant Stanford answered for the Crown that “there doth remain divers other treasons ...
... authorities had the right during trials to specify the statute on which proceedings rested; often they strengthened their cases by deciding in favor of the 1352 Edwardian statute, which did not mention witnesses. Also contradictory were ...
... authority of precedents and presence of witnesses; in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots (1586), it was the authenticity of a packet of encrypted letters; and in the trial of Walter Ralegh (1603), it was the legitimacy of words as ...
... authority. In The Performance of Conviction, Kenneth J. E. Graham cites Dudley Fenner's hope in 1588 that “the simple playnes” of The Artes of Logike and Rethorike will “drawe men to no curiouse or doubtfull discourses, but onely put ...
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 |