Annotation This volume reconstructs the lives of Henry VII's new men - low-born ministers with legal, financial, political, and military skills who enforced the king's will as he sought to strengthen government after the Wars of the Roses, examining how they exercised power, gained wealth, and spent it to sustain their new-found status.

Lacey Baldwin Smith re-evaluates the Tudor mania for conspiracy in the light of psychological and social impulses peculiar to the age. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Managing early modern England was difficult because the state was weak. Although Queen Elizabeth was the supreme ruler, she had little bureaucracy, no standing army, and no police force. This meant that her chief manager, Lord Burghley, had to work with the gentlemen of the magisterial classes in order to keep the peace and defend the realm. He did this successfully by employing the shared value systems of the ruling classes, an improved information system, and gentle coercion. Using Burghley's archive, Governing by Virtue explores how he ran a state whose employees were venal, who owned their jobs for life, or whose power derived from birth and possession, not allegiance, even during national crises like that of the Spanish Armada.

This volume analyzes the structure and practice of the political and administrative institutions and processes of early modern England, more specifically, the Tudors. The House of Tudor was a prominent European royal house that ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms from 1485 until 1603. The author concentrates his study on describing the ways in which the Tudor government actually worked, the people who ran it, the impact that it made upon society, and the reasons for its long survival.

English lyric poetry from Wyatt to Donne falls into three consecutive stylistic phases. Tottel's Miscellany presided over the first, making the lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey available for imitation by mid-century poets like Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, and George Gascoigne. The Shepheardes Calender and Sidney's Defense of Poesy ushered in the second, the Elizabethan or &"Golden&" phase of the 1580s and 1590s. In the third phase Donne and Jonson, reacting against the stylistic orientation of the Elizabethan poets, reconceived the status of &"poesy&" and resituated the lyric for a post-Elizabethan audience. Chapter 7 is shared between Donne and Jonson, post-Elizabethan writers who used metonymy to subvert the metaphoric stance of Elizabethan poetry. In a Postscript Hedley takes on the &"metaphysical conceit&" for a final demonstration of the explanatory power of Jakobson's theory of language. Professor Hedley uses the semiotic theory of Roman Jakobson to create stylistic profiles for each of these three phases of early Renaissance poetry. Along with the poetry itself she reexamines contemporary treatises, &"defenses,&" and &"notes of instruction&" to highlight key features of poetic practice. She proposes that early and mid-Tudor poetry is &"metonymic,&" that the collective orientation of the Elizabethan poets is &"metaphoric,&" and that Donne and Jonson bring metonymy to the fore once again. Chapter 1 sets out the essentials of Jakobson's theory. Hedley uses particular poems to show what is involved in claiming that a writer or a piece of writing has metaphoric or a metonymic basis. Chapter 2 explains how the metaphoric bias of Elizabethan poetry was produced, as &"poesy&" became part of England's national identity. This chapter broadens out beyond the lyric to include other modes of writing whose emergence belongs to an Elizabethan &"moment&" in the history of English literature. Beyond chapter 2, each chapter has a double purpose: to create stylistic profile for a single poetic generation and to highlight a particular aspect or feature of the poetry as an index of difference from one generation to the next. In the third chapter Hedley shows how Wyatt and Surrey used deixis metonymically to give their poems particular occasions. Chapter 4 explains how the metonymic bias of the mid-Tudor poets affected their use of metaphor, and highlights Gascoigne's appreciation of a metaphor as a social gambit or an instrument of moral suasion. Chapters 5 and 6 are centered in the Elizabethan period, but with perspectives into earlier and subsequent phases of metonymic writing. In chapter 5, a comprehensive discussion of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence shows how metaphoric writing cooperates with the &"poetic function&" of language. Chapter 6 deals with love poetry, as a social/political activity whose orientation differs radically from one generation of English Petrarchists to the next.