This article examines the historiography of rumour and its relationship to other disciplines, including psychology and anthropology. It explores the methodological problems of defining rumours and interpreting source material, as well as the limitations of psychological interpretations. It examines the ways in which rumours can allow us to access past mentalities and understand popular and elite politics, also analysing attempts by governments to monitor rumours and what they can tell us about the relationship between the individual and the state. Finally, it explores how the interpretations of rumours shaped, and were shaped by, race, gender, social differences and cultural attitudes. Although social scientists and historians have approached the study of rumour in very different ways, closer collaboration between the two can illuminate our understanding of this complex and fascinating phenomenon.
The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.
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This article explores the role of rumor in late Jacobean court politics. It argues that misinformation and disinformation were not incidental to the jostling for power and the interplay of faction that took place at court, but were instead major political forces, capable of affecting the fortunes of even the most powerful courtiers. Perception, as this article demonstrates, was everything at court, since false rumors that individual courtiers would be granted offices or would soon fall from power had a self-fulfilling potential. While contemporaries were quick to assume that rumors were spread deliberately, this paper demonstrates that such false reports were sometimes mere speculation and wishful thinking passed on as fact. False rumors made decisions about court appointments or the disgrace of ministers much more of a collective act, and much less the preserve of the king, than historians have hitherto realized.
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