The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England
News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660

This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.

Alastair Bellany (Author)

9780521782890, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 January 2002

336 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.66 kg

'[Bellany's] sensitive and scholarly account reminds us that if a single preoccupation dominated the political thinking of the English Renaissance, it was the provision of good counsel to kings.' London Review of Books

This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the seventeenth century's most notorious and sensational court scandal - the Overbury murder. The book challenges earlier approaches to the history of court scandal, rejecting both the assumption that it inevitably undermined royal authority and the tendency to dismiss scandal as politically insignificant. The book adopts a multi-layered, interdisciplinary approach to the Overbury affair and its complex political meanings. It explores the factional politics that made and destroyed Overbury and his murderers, reconstructs the news culture through which information about the scandal circulated, analyses the creation and composition of the early Stuart 'public', and decodes the representations of the affair that were produced and consumed during 1615–16 and in subsequent decades. By situating the Overbury case both in short- and long-term political contexts, the book offers a reading of court scandal's place in the cultural origins of the English revolution.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on quotations and dates
List of abbreviations
Introduction: poison in the fountain - understanding the politics of Jacobean court scandal
1. The court politics of the Overbury scandal
2. News culture and the Overbury affair
3. The sins of the Overbury murderers
4. 'The powder poison': popish plots and the Overbury scandal
5. Stamping the print of justice? Vengeance, mercy and repentance
6. Afterlives: the Overbury affair as history and memory
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: general [DSB]