Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension'Throughout this work Cressy shows the fruits of diligent archive work. One gets a clear and very useful impression of the multiple levels of the distribution of power and government, and particularly of the rhetorics within which they operate... Every piece here is stimulating.' -Reformation'Of interest to historians, literary scholars, and historical anthropologists... a fine interdisciplinary study.' -Sixteenth Century Journal'In this highly readable and instructive book, the well-known social historian David Cressy tells fifteen stories of strange or troubling incidents... he seeks to avoid the conventional formulation of a problem and a hypothesis and a 'clear sense of closure', relying instead on laying out his evidence as fully as possible, listening carefully to the 'voices of the past', and remaining alert to multiple connections and layers of significance.' -Ralph Houlbrooke, Times Literary SupplementIn Travesties and Transgressions, David Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. He shows how unorthodox happenings bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, excommunication and irregular burial, nakedness and cross-dressing disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge. |
Contents
Domestic | 51 |
Seduction Deception and Distress | 73 |
Gender Trouble and Cultural | 92 |
Who Buried Mrs Horseman? Excommunication | 116 |
Wars of Words in Parish and Pulpit | 138 |
Belief Unbelief and Traditionalism | 162 |
Turning the Tables and Breaking the Rails | 186 |
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Common terms and phrases
Adamites Agnes Bowker altar Anabaptists Anthony Anderson apparel Archbishop Archbishop Laud authorities baptism Bishop body born broadsheet Brownists burial buried Burton called Cambridge chancel Cheapside Cheapside Cross Christian church court churchwardens clergy clerical clothes common communion table cross-dressing CSPD Cuckfield culture diocese Early Modern England Early Stuart East Drayton ecclesiastical Edmund Curteys Edward Elizabeth Wyatt Elizabethan English Essex excommunicated female gender God's godly Harborough hath Hertfordshire High Commission History Holton holy honour Horseman Ibid Jacobean John Laud Laudian Leicestershire London Lord Lydia Downes magistrates Mercy Gould midwife minister monster monstrous births monstrous child Mynet naked neighbours Northamptonshire offence Oxford Oxfordshire pamphlet parish parishioners popish popular preached Prynne's puritan rails Ranters Record Office Reformation Religion religious reported Richard sacrament sermon servant sexual Skeete social Society story strange Stuart England Suffolk testimony Thomas Salmon thou tion transvestism Tudor unto vicar wife William Prynne woman women