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Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England : representations of the Midland Rising of 1607
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Hindle, Steve (2008) Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England : representations of the Midland Rising of 1607. History Workshop Journal, Vol.66 (No.1). pp. 21-61. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn029
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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 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | Vol.66 | ||||
| Number: | No.1 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 21-61 | ||||
| DOI: | 10.1093/hwj/dbn029 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access |
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