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Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England : representations of the Midland Rising of 1607
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Hindle, Steve, 1965-. (2008) Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England : representations of the Midland Rising of 1607. History Workshop Journal, Vol.66 (No.1). pp. 21-61. ISSN 1363-3554
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbn029
Abstract
This essay reconstructs the discourses concerning hunger, protest, punishment and paternalism that circulated during and after the Midland Rising, a series of anti-enclosure protests which spread across the counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire in the late spring and early summer of 1607. Through a reconstruction of the views of the rebel leader John Reynolds, of the monarch King James I, of the clergyman Robert Wilkinson and of the crown-lawyer Francis Bacon, it is suggested that, although though they disagreed about whether hunger might ever justify insurrection, those implicated in the Rising and its suppression shared a stock of common idioms – the scriptural critique of enclosure derived from the Book of Isaiah, the classical metaphor of the body politic, the hunger-pangs of the empty belly – with which to discuss the social problems of the day. These idioms, it is argued, were also deployed by a fifth observer of the Midland Rising, who in Act one Scene one of Coriolanus (first performed in 1608) represented a company of mutinous citizens standing up about the corn. Coriolanus is arguably Shakespeare's attempt to imagine insurrection by dramatizing it, and therefore constitutes a fertile source for the historian of early modern popular protest.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History |
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Levellers, Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714. |
| Journal or Publication Title: | History Workshop Journal |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| ISSN: | 1363-3554 |
| Official Date: | 2008 |
| Volume: | Vol.66 |
| Number: | No.1 |
| Page Range: | pp. 21-61 |
| Identification Number: | 10.1093/hwj/dbn029 |
| Status: | Peer Reviewed |
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access |
| URI: | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/326 |
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