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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... subjects, and writers for the stage in early modern England.3 Both the legal and the literary disciplines are devoted to representing ways of “knowing” the English subject, and both claim to represent the truth about that inscrutable ...
... subject the historical processes within these texts to closer analysis; and it allows us to explore relations between trials and plays in more particularity. Read dialogically within them— selves and against a range of plays, these ...
... subject might appropriately entertain, are continuously reformalized in official narratives.22 Although I assume a reciprocity among cultural representations, I also want to draw a distinction: in a treason trial, there is at the end of ...
... subjects, including many who subscribed to the principles of divine right, also believed that the monarch's authority was limited by the common law, the constitution, and the consent of Parliament.25 This notion of a limited monarchy ...
... subject's words did not express a direct intent to bring about the king's death, they could be interpreted as having malicious intent indirectly and the accused could be found guiltyoftreason.30 The kings lawyers justified these ...
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 |