Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution

Abstract

Having illuminated the production of polemical print to great effect in his first monograph, Politicians and Pamphleteers, Dr Peacey addresses its appropriation in his second, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. As he notes at the beginning of this important study, contemporaries were acutely aware of both a 'popular'-or participatory-'turn' (p. 2) in mid 17th-century politics, and the pivotal role that cheap print played in this development. Thus in 1640 commentators immediately recognized the novelty and importance of the phenomenon that historians have termed the 'explosion of print'. While some dismissed this textual tsunami, picturesquely, as mere 'bum fodder' (p. 2), many were alarmed that it would precipitate popular participation in the political process and, inevitably, social dislocation if not dissolution. Alongside such alarmist rhetoric, Peacey identifies alternative dispositions; practical engagement, admittedly often no more than pragmatic, but also principled defences of print's pedagogical value. Regardless of their stance on the 'print revolution', however, contemporaries were 'united in trying to grapple with what it might do to political life and popular participation' (p. 6).

Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records

“…The tag attached to the seal indicates it belongs to a dedimus potestatem addressed to Sir William Brereton and Thomas Smith in the matter between Daniell and Ireland. 73 That this was related to the Star Chamber action is confirmed by the signature 'Cotton' on the tag. Throughout the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, three generations of the Cotton family held the office of clerk of the process of Star Chamber, responsible for writing all of the writs issuing from the court under the great seal.…”

‘Innovation’ and revolution in seventeenth-century England

“…The vehement rejection of such interpretations by revisionist historians from the 1970s onwards often brought with it a rejection of the label 'revolution' for the mid-century crisis, and a concomitant assertion that mindsets in the pre-war period were profoundly 'unrevolutionary'. The English 'revolution' has now re-emerged from the revisionist attack, not as an exemplar of any socio-economic structural model of the causes and consequences of revolution, but as a recognisably revolutionary set of processes in social, political, and cultural terms (Peacey 2013;Como 2018). These processes -the mobilisation of the public, polarisation, and radicalisation both in politics and religion -accelerated rapidly under the pressure of the crisis.…”

London and England's early modernity: A review of recent scholarship

“…Such a concern is clearly evident in the case of political historians keen to stress the national scope of seventeenth‐century political culture. Two veterans of the History of Parliament Trust, Kyle () and Peacey (), have each argued that the place of parliamentary politics in English life changed in decisive ways during the seventeenth century. For Kyle, parliament's new political importance during the 1620s emerged through new techniques including humanist public oratory, the circulation of news and information both in print and in manuscript, and the emerging practices of lobbying and public engagement, all of which forged a new form of theatrical governance geared towards a new “public sphere.” Peacey, similarly, traces a fundamental change to political practice centering around the new powers and procedures of parliament, in his case, during the mid‐century Revolution.…”