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Mental World (mental + world)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

The State of Christendom: history, political thought and the Essex circle*

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 213 2008
Alexandra Gajda
The State of Christendom, published in 1657, is a forgotten Elizabethan treatise, and a significant but neglected work of late Elizabethan scholarship and political thought. It is argued that the treatise was authored by members of the circle of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex in the mid fifteen-nineties, and that it reflects the political and scholarly concerns of Essex and his followers, especially Anthony Bacon, and their engagement with Catholic politics and polemic. The scholarly methodology of the author and the political arguments of the treatise are analysed, in particular the author's interest in tyranny and the remedies for the restraint of tyrants, which shed light on the contexts that shaped the discussion of political ideas in late Elizabethan England and the mental world of the Essex circle. [source]

Crowland's World: A Westminster View of the Yorkist Age

HISTORY, Issue 298 2005
MICHAEL HICKS
The Second Anonymous Crowland Continuation is the premier chronicle of the Yorkist age. It also provides unique access to the mental world of its author, a senior cleric in the royal secretariat, and through him to that of his milieu, the civil service at Westminster. He was a ,fly on the wall', who witnessed everything but apparently influenced nothing. He may not have understood all he saw, but he remembered almost all of it, including, most pricelessly, the successive changes of mind so often retrospectively rationalized out. Crowland emerges as a mixture of high principle and sometimes naivety, blatant prejudices and worldly cynicism. This article also shows that he was capable of silent criticism and even condemnation of the actions that he observed and executed. He offers important insights to his world. [source]

,Memories of the Maimed': The Testimony of Charles I's Former Soldiers, 1660,1730

HISTORY, Issue 290 2003
Mark Stoyle
Historians have paid little attention to the experiences and attitudes of the ordinary men who enlisted in the royalist armies during the English Civil War: chiefly because such individuals , most of them poor and unlettered , left no formal memoirs of their wartime service behind them. The present article suggests that the petitions for financial relief which were submitted by wounded and impoverished Cavalier veterans after the Restoration can help to bridge this evidential gap and to illuminate the mental world of the king's more humble supporters. By putting the language of the ,maimed soldiers' petitions' under the microscope, it shows how the artisans, husbandmen and labourers who had fought for Charles I viewed the conflict in retrospect. The article begins by considering the strengths and limitations of the petitions themselves and the purposes for which they were initially composed. It then goes on to discuss what these documents reveal: not only about the physical suffering which the king's soldiers had undergone in the field, but also about their views of their comrades, their commanders and their enemies. The article concludes by arguing that the personal and political links which had been forged amid the fiery trials of the Civil War continued to bind together former royalists, of all ranks, for decades after the conflict came to an end. [source]

Calvinist Internationalism and the English Officer Corps, 1562,1642

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2006
David Trim
This article uses a crucial but little-known text to examine two problematic issues in early-modern history: whether there was, in any meaningful sense, a ,Calvinist international'; and the extent to which religious commitment influenced career soldiers. The Defence of Militarie Profession (1579), by a Calvinist soldier, Geoffrey Gates, is rich on both issues and an excellent potential source for students. This article outlines how close reading reveals a transnational concept of the Reformed Churches as Israel, derived from a distinctive understanding and application of the Bible. Then, analysis of English military officers indicates that many were Calvinist and shared this internationalist concept of their confession. Thus, this essay argues that a ,Calvinist international' did exist as a conscious transnational movement and that its ideology was an important factor in the mental world of English career soldiers; and it introduces a text that students can use to explore these large issues. [source]