Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Anne is Dead!: Anne Lives


Queen Anne is Dead! Not a Smith's song, but an upcoming daylong conference on the end of the Stuart queen's reign and the beginning of a Hanoverian king's, appropriately enough on 1 August. (Germans have jumped ahead to the post-Stuart era - unless one is a Jacobite - with a series of exhibits on The Hanoverians on Britain’s Throne 1714-1837. And the British royal palaces aren't far behind (above, and a fuller list). The anachronism of the paparizzi in this video does make one ask, is there no history of the decline of court culture? were all Stuarts and all Hanoverians equally the center of both elite and popular culture? Did the King (then) have the same star quality as Prince (in the late 1980s)?

Anne Boleyn's Execution from John Stow's Annals (ca.  1603)
From one Anne, to another. Former student, Torie Manning, continues to alert me to things Tudor. Writer Clair Ridgway's blog has provided a list of links to "Cheap Anne Boleyn Resources" (October 3, 2013) from British History Online, Archives.org, Open Library, etc. Student primary source research on the first half of the 16th century begin here. (For a lecture on things Boleyn, and a pro-active Henry VIII, listen to George Bernard's "The Life and Reputation of Anne Boleyn," from November 2013.)



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earlymodernengland by Newton Key.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

On Not Negotiating with Terrorists

Source from Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers
Early modern sieges were as much a matter of writing to/talking with the enemy as fighting them. Certainly a case can be made for Oliver Cromwell viewing at least a portion of the Irish as terrorists: "barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands with so much innocent blood." Yet, his letters include many to his besieged Irish enemies negotiating terms of surrender (Ross, etc.). In any case, this selection from the Edinburgh Evening Courant, 7 Jan. 1746, shows a studied refusal to negotiate/exchange hostages with rebels/terrorists, all the while, in fact setting up the terms for negotiating.

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earlymodernengland by Newton Key.
 

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