Group blog
Mistris Parliament–part blog, part website–is a meeting place for the six members in a history tutorial on the English Civil Wars at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in the spring semester of 2010. For now, it’s mostly a storehouse of websites and other resources, with emphasis on politics, religion, women, and print culture, but we’ll see how it evolves.
The name? It comes from a series of four royalist political pamphlets written in April and May of 1648 when it became clear that negotiations between Charles I or Parliament would end in stalemate, the result being God knew what sort of monstrous state. The first pamphlet imagines Parliament as a woman about to give birth to that monster in a “room … strangely overcome with darkness,” where the candles go out by themselves and there can be heard “thunderings, intermix’d with the wawling of Catts.” The baby is horrifying–”a deformed shape, without a head, great goggle eyes, bloody hands growing out of both sides of its devouring paunch.”
Popular Royalism and Cheap Print
19 March 2018
I recently published an article in Studies in Philology (114, no 3: 609-640) that might be of interest to those of you interested in the intersection of popular royalism and cheap...
Andrew McRae’s Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England
23 June 2014
I recently had occasion to dip in and out of Andrew McRae’s new-ish Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge U P, 2009), which investigates the meanings...
An update from Mistris Parliament
19 May 2013
Just popping in to say that most of my energies these last few months went into teaching and working on my research project. Among other things, I taught a revised version of “Writing...
Of databases, directories, and despair
11 November 2012
I’m sort of obsessed with scholarly databases. I casually drop their names in conversations with students and colleagues the way people at cocktail parties make offhand references...