Where Was Political Thought in England, c. 1600–1642? (symposium)

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Where Was Political Thought in England, c. 1600-1642?

Fall Symposium (2013–2014)

This symposium asks about the spaces and places within which political thought was conducted, circulated, and debated in the decades leading up to the Parliamentary crisis of 1642, and it does so with a format that is designed to open up to general discussion from comments and framing questions set by session leaders. All political thinking occurred within identifiable institutions, arenas, and even buildings, but the ways in which these spaces shaped political thought have rarely been comprehensively assessed. What value might there be if the history of political thought were to follow a variety of other historical fields in taking a “spatial turn”? Sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, this symposium will bring together several dozen scholars interested in the early seventeenth century to address the distinctive kinds of political thought that emerged from country houses and aristocratic households, in universities and theaters, at the Inns of Court and the common-law courts, or from chartered companies and colonial settlements. How did they differ from, and how might they have converged with, the political thinking conducted in Westminster Hall or at Paul’s Cross? How did political thought circulate among these spaces, in what forms, and with what transformative effects as it moved?

Session leaders: Christy Anderson (University of Toronto), Christopher Brooks (Durham University), Thomas Cogswell (University of California, Riverside), David Como (Stanford University), Andrew Fitzmaurice (University of Sydney), Cynthia Herrup (University of Southern California), Ann Hughes (Keele University), Julia Merritt (University of Nottingham), Noah Millstone (Harvard University), Mary Morrissey (University of Reading), Sarah Mortimer (Christ Church, Oxford), Alan Orr (Maryland Institute College of Art), Carla Gardina Pestana (UCLA), Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge), Barbara Shapiro (University of California, Berkeley), Philip J. Stern (Duke University), and Jenny Wormald (University of Edinburgh) have been invited to start conversations on these and related questions.