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 6-10 de 74
... written lost letters, or spoken one's mind.” Often what was to be proved in these trials of the imagination was less that one had done something than that one had thought something, although neither act was understood as wholly ...
... writing, in which claims to plainness are claims to truth, to its selfauthenticating nature (people recognize it as familiar) and to its implicit ap— peal to a higher authority. In The Performance of Conviction, Kenneth J. E. Graham ...
... written forms. Although the precise composition of audiences for these stories remains elusive, it is likely that it included groups interested in both old and new thinking, lawyers and law students, gentry with business interests in ...
... written, oral, and ceremonial forms of legal practices were circulating among a varied and variously interested audience.63 Throughout the sixteenth century, emerging legal discourses were also available more and more widely to official ...
... writing the many oral and ceremonial practices that recapitulated crucial trials and executions. Holinshed reprinted ballads and verses that often followed on arrests or punishments, and included lengthy representations of such ...
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 |