Mixed Constitutionalism and Parliamentarism in Elizabethan England: The Case of Thomas Cartwright

The Admonition Controversy (1572–1577), largely between Thomas Cartwright (1534/5–1603) and John Whitgift (1530–1604) has proven fecund ground for intellectual historians analysing the religious dimension to early-modern political ideas. This paper argues that the religious dimension of Cartwright's mixed constitutionalism needs better explanation, rather than just noting that his ecclesiastical mixed constitutionalism (Presbyterianism) mirrors his political mixed constitutionalism. This paper tracks Cartwright's progressive, dialogical unfolding of his mixed constitutionalism in response to Whitgift's attempt to derive episcopacy from the fact of English monarchy, effectively discrediting the Admonition to Parliament (1572). Furthermore, the essay outlines how the Cartwright–Whitgift debate led Cartwright to emphasise a parliamentarist mixed constitution when most of his contemporaries, especially the more famous mixed constitutionalist, Thomas Smith, portrayed the English parliament leaning noticeably towards the monarch. This analysis accepts that religious polemic was a major driving force in the normalisation of parliamentarism, yet seeks to show exactly how this worked out in one of the most important church–state disputes in Elizabethan England.     

Persian Ambassadors,their Circassians,and the Politics of Elizabethan and Regency England

The coincidence of the appearance of two Circassian women as wives of ambassadors on the Anglo-Persian diplomatic and political stage has generated more than passing interest in academic and lay literature. Though the story of Sir Robert Sherley and Lady Teresia Sherley is better known in British circles, and has even generated renewed interest with two simultaneous exhibitions in 2009 in London, the story of Fath Ali Shah's Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Abol Hassan Khan, has not received sufficient attention, and has certainly not been fully explored in the context of the politics of Regency England. The present article revisits key moments of the life of the Sherleys and of Abol Hassan Khan and Delaram, his Circassian wife, but goes beyond the retelling of their journeys to focus on how the latter two's visit to England generated bawdy depictions in the popular press and became the vehicle for political satire quite unconnected to their persons.     

Cannibalism & politics: The English Renaissance revisited

This article explores how anthropological approaches to Anglo-Native American exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries – thinking through and beyond terms like ‘cannibal’ – can draw attention to different facets of encounter and shed light on the influence of indigeneity on English heritage. Using the Englishman Anthony Knivet’s travels to Brazil in the 1590s as a case study, what emerges is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches which acknowledge the complicated and at times surprising interactions between representations and lived experience, between rituals and their appropriations. Further, acknowledging the influence of indigenous American people and artefacts on English history has important implications for addressing the legacy of imperialism in cultural institutions, opening up new possibilities for collaboration, display and reconciliation.     

The history men. The historical profession in England since the Renaissance

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation's hinterlands.