Reading the Regime

This book is the culmination of semester-long student research on the ways in which early modern English royal authority was created, legitimized, performed, and challenged through ritual, image, and text. Students completed this research while enrolled in Dr. Stephanie Koscak's spring 2016 undergraduate history course on English Kings, Queens, and Spectacle at Wake Forest University. This course had two main goals. First, it introduced students to major themes, questions, and debates in the history of monarchy and political culture between the reigns of Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) and George II (r. 1727-1760), focusing on the use of media to glorify and challenge royal power. Our second goal was to explore how transformations in media impacted ideas about monarchy and political authority. We considered how authors-including kings and queens-constructed their own authority in print, and how early modern readers interacted with the expanding world of published texts and images. By studying both the history of monarchy along with changes in media, including the invention of the modern newspaper, the expansion of the engraving industry, and the rise of the public sphere, students came away from this course with a deeper, critical understanding of royal representation within the broader world of politics. The essays in this collection examine a diverse set of primary sources published in early modern England, including religious histories, collections of state documents, partisan tracts, cheap royal romances, and plays. Each of these items is held in Special Collections at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library.