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Todd Butler charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined and effected political action. He draws upon a myriad of literary and political texts, including the work of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, and John Milton.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Equivocation, Donne, and the Political Interior
- 2: The Moderation of Oath-Taking in Jacobean England
- 3: Composition, Counsel, and the Prerogatives of Deliberation
- 4: Deliberation, Tyranny, and Time in Early Caroline England
- 5: The Politics and Genre of Captured Correspondence
- 6: Naseby, Milton, and The Politics of Marital Intimacy
- Conclusion: Political Cognition in the Restoration and Beyond
About the author
Todd Butler is Associate Professor (English) and Associate Dean for Faculty (College of Arts and Sciences) at Washington State University, where he researches and teaches on seventeenth-century English literature, law, and political theory. Author of Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, he has also published essays on early modern crime and witchcraft, print culture, and the connections between early modern literature and contemporary U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence. He is a past president of the MLA Discussion Group on Law and Literature and the current president of the Association of Departments of English.
Summary
Todd Butler charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined and effected political action. He draws upon a myriad of literary and political texts, including the work of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, and John Milton.
Additional text
Butler's journey through what he describes as intellective prerogatives and liberties charts an intriguing path through confessionals, court rooms, chambers of Parliament, royal cabinets, and Edenic domiciles in order to illustrate the gradual democratization of decision making and interpretation during the seventeenth century ... Butler reveals how intellection was not only a process by which political opinions and their subsequent actions were formed but also a process over which political battles were fought throughout the seventeenth century's Early Stuart period and beyond.
