Abstract:
In this lecture, based on a paper co-authored with five colleagues from England, the Netherlands, and Poland, I call for a new approach to representative assemblies of early modern Europe and beyond. While there are vast national historiographies on the legal-constitutional structure of such institutions, little effort has been made to reconstruct their cultural and transnational dimension: a phenomenon we define as ‘parliamentary culture’. We argue that there is much to be gained from an investigation of the culture surrounding representative assemblies – how they influenced and shaped political behaviour and were shaped by it, and how they were embedded into the thought of their time and period – and from seeing them as part of a set of common European traditions of political negotiation and consent. We suggest an interdisciplinary and collaborative agenda for that investigation that might lead beyond Europe too, into some of its colonies, where European traditions encountered and hybridized with other cultures of negotiated discussion and agreement.
Prof. Paulina Kewes
Bio
Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published widely on early modern literature, history, political thought, and parliamentary culture. She is the author of Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and editor or co-editor of numerous volumes, including, most recently, Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations (2019) and Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, c. 1570-1670 (2020). She is the P-I on an interdisciplinary project ‘Recovering Europe's Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700'. Paulina holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2021-2024) awarded for Contesting the Royal Succession in Reformation England, Latimer to Shakespeare, a book to be published by Oxford University Press.