Todd Butler

Swearing Justice in Henry Goodcole and The Witch of Edmonton

This essay demonstrates how the dual plots of The Witch of Edmonton and Henry Goodcoles related pamphlet are unified by their common concern with the legal and performative power of words. Both play and pamphlet emphasize the power of speech, in particular the swearing of oaths and confessions, to constitute and to transform identity. Though patterned after its source pamphlet, the play ultimately diverges to demonstrate how speech legitimated by the processes of law often awkwardly coexists with its more popular expression, thereby simultaneously critiquing early modern law while laying claim to the very power that enables it.

A dialog on teaching an undergraduate seminar in special collections

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for the collaborative teaching of undergraduates in special collections and demonstrates how providing students with the opportunities to work rare books can result in meaningful experiences for both students and faculty.Design/methodology/approach – Collaborative teaching across disciplines, in this case an English faculty member and a librarian can be challenging and rewarding. This paper is written in dialogue form and highlights both perspectives.Findings – For academics and librarians interested in incorporating book history and special collections in undergraduate coursework, this paper underscores the benefits and pitfalls in planning such courses.Practical implications – This is an honest discussion on methods to engage undergraduates with rare books and exhibit preparations.Originality/value – As many library professionals seek to make their rare book collections more accessible through class instruction, this paper provides one pedagogica...

Bacon and the Politics of the Prudential Imagination

While Francis Bacon has often been considered hostile to the powers of the imagination, this essay argues that Bacon must be seen as simultaneously suspicious of and fascinated by this mental faculty. For Bacon, the imagination becomes a key pathway to political authority, one accessible to any individual. In texts such as De Augmentis, the Sylva Sylvarum, and his brief reflections on Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, politics becomes less about Bacons specific relationship to royal authority and more about his assessment of a mental mechanism that when properly restrained offered significant power to all who could master its workings.

The Cognitive Politics of Writing in Jacobean England: Bacon, Coke, and the Case of Edmund Peacham

This essay demonstrates how disputes over the cognitive processes that structure both manuscript and print helped establish and limit Jacobean state authority. It investigates the 1614 clash between James I, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke that occurred in the aftermath of the arrest of Edmund Peacham, a Somerset minister, and the discovery of his undelivered sermon that attacked James. The ensuing debate over the nature of Peacham’s offense and the textual evidence that revealed it is then juxtaposed with disputes over Coke’s Reports. When read together, these debates demonstrate how early modern disputes over the processes of writing illumine a much larger struggle over how mechanisms of individual and corporate thought can constitute a nascent claim to a liberty of the mind.

Imagination and Leadership in Elizabethan England

On October 4, 1596, Francis Bacon sat down to write what would become a lengthy letter of advice to the Earl of Essex, then one of the most powerful courtiers in Elizabethan England. Such correspondence between the two men was not in itself unusual. Bacon had served as an informal advisor and petitioner to Essex for at least five years.1 What was unusual about this particular letter, however, was both the nature of Bacon’s advice and the frankness with which it was delivered. Only three months earlier, during a combined Anglo-Dutch operation, Essex had secured great fame and popular acclaim by leading the successful sack of the Spanish port city of Cadiz. The expedition, however, was not without its failures—the English had not been able to capture intact the West Indies merchant fleet that lay in the harbor (the Spanish burned it instead), and the capture of the city itself failed to yield treasure proportionate to both the Queen’s investment and, more importantly, her expectations. Essex had also clashed with other commanders over his demands (ultimately unfulfilled) to garrison the city as a base for further operations, a plan that ran counter to the quick-strike strategy initially envisioned at the expedition’s outset.2 Not surprisingly then, upon their return, Essex and his military and court rivals clashed repeatedly over apportioning responsibility for the expedition’s glories and its failures, pursuing political gain not only in the closed rooms of the court but also through more widely distributed manuscripts, engravings, and public gifts.3

Image, Rhetoric, and Politics in the early Thomas Hobbes

While critics have relied upon bibliographical data and his translation of Thucydides to establish the early Thomas Hobbes as a humanist, this essay argues that substantive evidence to support this conclusion can be found in the comparatively neglected discourses of the Horae Subsecivae. Reading Hobbes contribution to the Horae alongside his translation of Thucydides reveals a consistent concern with the political potential of both verbal and visual images and with the dangers rhetorical manipulation could pose to individual and sovereign authority. Together these texts demonstrate an early Hobbes already deeply invested in the political debates and crises of his era.