Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
Summary
Indeed it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things, after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
(Cicero, in Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 1.2)There is now a cohesive literature on political office-holding in early-modern Britain. Following Ernst Kantorowicz's seminal study of kingship has been valuable work on the village constable, on the county Lord Lieutenant, and more broadly on the judiciary and priesthood. The changing scope of socially instituted office has been recognised as crucial to the formation of the modern state, political participation and the outbreak of the Civil Wars. Historiographically, the analysis of office has been held to be central to the reintegration of social and intellectual history. Nevertheless, notions of office have been too narrowly conceived and far less attention has been given to how people argued about offices, to what an office was taken to entail, and how and to what ends the vocabulary of its specification was actually deployed.
The argument here is that from the evidence of language, we may properly conjecture what I shall call a presupposition of office broadly characteristic of early modern England. By restricting attention to designated political offices, we decipher, as it were, without a key, and do injustice to debate that went well beyond them. We may even beg questions if, a priori, we marginalise some forms of office talk as only derivative of core political concepts.
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- Information
- Argument and Authority in Early Modern EnglandThe Presupposition of Oaths and Offices, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006