Paul Jones, History Seminar, Monday 19th November
19th November 2012
‘Royalist Print and Textual Space, 1643-1646’
Tonight our colleague Paul Jones is delivering a paper for the History Seminar series, entitled ‘Royalist Print and Textual Space, 1643-1646’. Please find an abstract of Paul’s paper below:
In recent years there has been a surge of interest in both royalism and print culture during the middle of the seventeenth century. Royalist print and its subversive nature during the 1650s have been of particular interest. Much research has been conducted on the production, circulation, readership, politics and messages of royalist newsbooks and pamphlets printed in the years following Charles I’s execution.
This paper aims to build on these interests by focusing on the key royalist newsbooks of the first civil war, such as Mercurius Aulicus. The underpinning concept of this paper is that royalist newsbooks between 1643 and 1646 offer a different view of the royalist cause which needs to be considered. An exploration of the physicality, characteristics and themes of royalist newsbooks forms the basis of this work, with the intention of developing new insights into the nature and identity of royalism. The suggestion is that royalist newsbooks relied on their physical features to assert their authority, and that they attempted to control meaning in order to align the king’s cause with an English identity.