The Material Culture of the Jacobites

Abstract

The Jacobites, adherents of the exiled King James II of England and VII of Scotland and his descendants, continue to command attention long after the end of realistic Jacobite hopes down to the present. Extraordinarily, the promotion of the Jacobite cause and adherence to it were recorded in a rich and highly miscellaneous store of objects, including medals, portraits, pin-cushions, glassware and dice-boxes. Interdisciplinary and highly illustrated, this book combines legal and art history to survey the extensive material culture associated with Jacobites and Jacobitism. Neil Guthrie considers the attractions and the risks of making, distributing and possessing 'things of danger'; their imagery and inscriptions; and their place in a variety of contexts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, he explores the many complex reasons underlying the long-lasting fascination with the Jacobites.

Memory studies and the eighteenth century

“…Of these, Harold Weber's () Memory, Print and Gender in England, 1653–1759 figures importantly as it considers the “technologies of storage and transmission [that] govern both the form and content of what individuals and societies can remember” (p. 2). Dermot Ryan's () Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820 also connects mediation and cultural memory as it explores writing as “a set of practices embedded in and facilitating other social and material activities” (p. 4), while both Neil Guthrie () and Murray Pittock () have discussed non‐print mediations of Jacobite memories. A significant cluster of research also directly links media and cultural memory in the context of the American colonies and transatlantic circulation (Stabile, ; Straub, ), influenced by that pioneer of transatlantic memory studies, Joseph Roach ().…”

Henry Hunt’s White Hat: The Long Tradition of Mute Sedition

“…So strongly entrenched was Jacobite material culture as a political statement that the government propaganda against it had stressed the 'superior relationship to reality' enjoyed by the Whig administration compared to the 'symbolic practices' of the Jacobites that were in their turn to shape the definition of the materiality of sedition in the Radical era, where coat buttons and blue ribbons both were used to denote loyalty to the Crown, just as white was used by the Radicals. 18 Party colours gained a major popular presence for perhaps the first time in the conflicts of the Stuart and Jacobite eras, and they persisted in public political demonstrations. They had first appeared extensively in the Exclusion Crisis, with green ribbons signifying support for Exclusion, red for the Crown and blue for supporters of Monmouth.…”