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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 58
... evidence that treason was perceived as an in creasingly serious threat, policed with a new urgency, and publicized with fresh intensity during the sixteenth century. To ensure that trials would gather attention, the Crown convened open ...
... evidence and persuasion, in the ways it stages assumptions about the possibility of knowing other minds, and in the ways plays engage in conversation with trials.5 Since treason was defined as compassing the king's death in the ...
... evidence that must meet the difliculties of revealing an elusive self and a loyal subject.11 Conventionally, drama was granted only a peripheral claim to truthtelling in such formulations as Sir Philip Sidney's in “An Apology for Poetry ...
... evidence was a relatively straightforward matter because proof was embedded in an object. But without material evidence, where no discernable action may have occurred, how were jurists to prove outlawed behavior? What a trial set out to ...
... then, might be the crime or they might be evidence of the crime in any given prosecution. What these trials illuminate is that in Tudor legal practice, what counted as an “overt act” was unpredictable and frequently turned. 12 Introduction.
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 |