Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 900
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 978-0-7190-8606-9
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Kewes was the originator and co-editor of this interdisciplinary volume, which reveals the pivotal influence of the succession question on the politics, religion and culture of the post-Armada years. She co-authored the Introduction (7,700 words) and chapter 2 (12,000 words) reconsidering the earlier Elizabethan succession question, and wrote Chapter 3 (10,500 words) challenging the prevalent assumption that after Mary Stuart’s execution in February 1587, Puritans promptly rallied around the candidacy of her Protestant son James VI of Scotland. Kewes also provided critical feedback on drafts of all the chapters. The Introduction offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the nature of the late Elizabethan succession question, situating the succession within its historiographical and chronological contexts. Chapter 2: ‘The Earlier Elizabethan Succession Question Revisited’ explains the shifts in the political actions and polemical output of Protestants and Catholics before Mary Stuart’s beheading in 1587 so as to contextualize the ‘long’ 1590s – the main subject of this book. It argues that there was more to the succession question before February 1587 than just the campaign for the exclusion of the Catholic claimant, Mary Stuart: that is why, after Mary’s death, the succession remained disputed. Kewes’s solo Chapter 3: ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit, and the Jacobean Succession’ uses as a case study the tracts by the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth to show that the godly were far from convinced of James VI’s suitability until after the publication of the Jesuit Robert Persons’s incendiary treatise A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1595), which scathingly impugned James’s credentials. The chapter thus prompts a wider reappraisal of the confessional and constitutional dimensions of the succession controversy across manuscript and printed polemic circulating in England, Scotland, and on the Continent.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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