Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

ISBN-13: 9780521819480 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 254 str.

Krista Kesselring; K. J. Kesselring; Anthony Fletcher

Opis

Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture, and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity.

Recenzje

'… this is an important and well-crafted study, written in a lively style, which repays careful reading. It offers many new insights and its findings also have significant implications for the wider discussion concerning crime and public order in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England.' Sehepunkte

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations and conventions; 1. Introduction: mercy and the state; 2. Changing approaches to punishment and mitigation; 3. Changing approaches to the pardon; 4. Patronage, petitions and the motives for mercy; 5. Public performances of pardon; 6. Protest and pardons; 7. Conclusion; Appendix I: sources; Appendix II: benefit of the belly; Bibliography; Index.