Search

This article reconsiders one aspect of Christopher Haigh's influential article 'Anticlericalism and the English Reformation'. His article argued that anticlericalism in early 16th-century England had been exaggerated, mislabelled and (in effect) invented as a scholarly construct. Dr Haigh proceeded to dismantle the foundations of anticlericalism in literature, in litigation, and in legislation. Evidence of anticlericalism in parliament, he maintained, was discontinuous, opportunistic and unrepresentative. This article suggests, however, that Haigh's claim makes insufficient allowance for the scarcity of the sources, underestimates the degree of continuity before and after 1529, and fails to take into account the inherently public character of parliamentary petitioning. It proposes, instead, that the challenging of the Church's wealth, the criticizing of clerical abuses, and the questioning of ecclesiastical jurisdiction recurred in early Tudor parliaments, and that the significance of such thwarted attempts at legislative reform crossed sessions and became cumulative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the conference, "Herrschaft und Verwaltung in der Frühen Neuzeit," on the subject of political administration in early modernity, held from October 19th to October 20th, 2012, in Essen, Germany. Topics discussed include the constitutional function of the church in the monarchy of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in the region of southern Holland (1706-1720), the relationship between local and regional rulers with their subjects in the Hessen-Kassel region of Germany around 1668, and a comparison of Court-Parliament relations in England, Sweden and Prussia in the 18th century.

Shakespeare's history plays in general, and "Henry V" in particular, grant a good deal of attention to Parliament. The injunction by the opening Chorus of Henry V, "Into a thousand parts divide one man," echoes Speaker of the House Edward Coke's anecdote about the origins of a bicameral Parliament, in the course of which he recounted a knight's purported remark that "his Majestie and the lordes there every one being great persons represented but themselves, but his commons though they were inferiour men yet every one of them represented a thousand men." "Henry V," like Shakespeare's earlier histories, explores the relationship between theatrical and parliamentary forms of representation. Recognizing the ways in which the plays both draw upon and challenge Elizabethan ideas about parliamentary representation casts new light on the relations between nobles and commoners in Shakespeare's histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]