Browsing by Subject "English Civil Wars"

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    "The Abhorred Name of Turk": Muslims and the Politics of Identity in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads
    (2016-11) Sisneros, Katie
    From historiographies to dramas, captivity narratives to mercantile ledgers, Anglo-Muslim studies has been in pursuit of an overall conceptualization the uniquely insular English population had of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire. But to approach an understanding of what the English thought of the Turk, one must necessarily consider the broad range of socio-political and economic conditions of the various echelons of English society. This dissertation explores a popular literature that - although a significant number of these texts exist that deals with the crucial relationship between Christians and Muslims - has heretofore never been considered as a whole in the context of how they represent the Muslim Turk. Broadside ballads, consumed widely and across the social and economic spectrum, were more accessible to and often indeed written expressly for the poor population of England who were largely illiterate and had little to no expendable time or income, and the Turk was a favored metaphor in broadside ballad literature throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the function of the term “Turk” in seventeenth century broadside ballads depended so much on (and whose fluctuation was so closely attuned to) local politics that the term was largely stripped of any meaning, functioning simply as an “enemy” against which the English compared themselves and defined proper “Englishness.” My dissertation moves from the early decades of the century and the drama and discourse around piracy, through the tumultuous English Civil Wars and Interregnum, and through the Exclusion Crisis and the invasion of Vienna by Ottoman forces in order to trace the evolution of the presence of the Turk in popular broadside ballad. My research shows that Muslims performed a crucial function in the construction of the English identity, and no body of literature illustrates how closely the term “Turk” was linked to “not English” as clearly as the popular broadside ballad.
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    Monuments of truth: domesticity, memory, and politics in the English Civil Wars and restoration
    (2014-05) Schumacher-Schmidt, Dana Michelle
    "Monuments of Truth" focuses on Englishwomen's texts from the 1650s to 1670s that attempt to reframe history and control access to the recent past. Turmoil marks the years covered by this project, and throughout this period the authors I consider and the politically-defined communities to which they belong experience multiple turns of fortune's wheel. While at some point all deal with injustice, injury, and instability that originates in war, they experience this most urgently at different times depending on their political allegiances. Thus the first two chapters of my dissertation consider royalist commemoration from the Commonwealth years, in the forms of autobiography and recipe book, that helped construct and sustain a community in exile and defeat prior to the return of the Stuart monarchy. The latter half of the dissertation turns to the work of the republican Lucy Hutchinson, who struggles to come to terms with the Restoration as a source of personal and political grief. Both sections trace the meanings about war that individual authors make for themselves and express in their own stories, but in ways that link them up with and make them available for shared commemorative efforts, including publication and the use of particular keywords or vocabularies of metaphor. Throughout the dissertation, I show that writers from across the spectrum of religious and political affiliation and working in diverse genres nevertheless turn to languages of the domestic in order to collectivize their individual memories of the wars. This project contributes to growing research in several areas: the politicization of domesticity in the seventeenth century, women's war writing, and the relationship between memory and history in accounts of the English Civil Wars.