Acceso usuarios
Catherine Chou
How might attention to the materiality of political communication alter our accounts of political history? Through a major archival discovery, this article upsets a central tenet of Elizabethan historiography: the claim that the political elite was united against the queen in embracing parliamentary and conciliar governance as a solution to the succession crisis that dominated her reign. Instead, by reconstructing the production and circulation of a previously-unexamined set of manuscripts, this article reveals that the Elizabethan establishment was divided over both the advisability of adopting such measures in the event of the queen's untimely death, and the question of whether experimental parliaments and councils constituted a recurring motif in English and European history (or a radical departure from normative, legitimate modes of governance). Opponents of these schemes argued that they both expanded the political nation in dangerous ways (reducing the possibility for unanimity and cohesion) and arbitrarily limited the number of stakeholders and participants (leading to a potentially volatile accumulation of grievances). Even as the uncertainty of the Elizabethan succession question incentivised a vision of the English polity as quasi-republican in nature, and thus able to withstand the vicissitudes of hereditary monarchy, the commentators featured in this article resisted the imputation that parliament and council were flexible templates rather than fixed institutions; and that political ideology should be shaped to fit historical contingency, instead of acting to limit the range of acceptable responses to dynastic and religious crisis.
