Proceedings of the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth I, 1582-1583
- Submitting institution
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King's College London
- Unit of assessment
- 31 - Theology and Religious Studies
- Output identifier
- 118624176
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Boydell Press
- ISBN
- 9781843836537
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- The final version of this large output was expected in the public domain by December 2020.The book had been almost complete since August 2020, and if camera ready copy could have been finalised in October, the print deadline of 31st December 2020 would have been met. However, COVID-19 delayed matters seriously, partly because of time to prepare online teaching materials but largely because necessary library resources could not be accessed. The final proofs are submitted because the published version was not available before submission, but the publisher has stated that the output will be in the public domain by 31/03/2021.
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The Privy Council was the principal institution governing Early-Modern England. The work of 20 years, these volumes present (Part I) one of its registers hitherto thought destroyed, but discovered abroad and relatively inaccessible. The manuscript is long and complex: across 284 pages, 672 entries address myriad important issues. Most entries summarize directives. I located 103 actual letters, printed in Part II. Contextualizing these extensive primary sources meant mastering many fields and researching in 73 repositories worldwide—a sustained undertaking. The multi-faceted Introduction (808 pages) offers an original interpretation of the Elizabethan constitution and of the Privy Council’s place within it.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Nobody else was responsible for the production of these volumes. I found the register, typed up a transcript, minutely checked it against the manuscript over three visits to the foreign repository and researched and wrote the scholarly apparatus. In a work of this kind, there are countless editorial decisions, but few choices regarding inclusion, in that one cannot investigate certain entries and ignore others. They must all be contextualized, though what is discoverable obviously varies considerably. Part I contains 4192 footnotes. Part II was self-selecting: it was a question of tracing actual conciliar dispatches from 1582–83 wherever they might be and providing a critical apparatus for all of them. Part II contains 1559 endnotes. Most Part II letters correspond to Part I register entries, but some (for a range of reasons, one being the need to maintain secrecy) were omitted from registration. In order effectively to contextualize this huge body of new material, it was necessary to bring together ancillary sources, here printed in 9 appendices. The largest appendix (119 pages) reconstructs the benches of JPs for all English counties. Editorial choices really came into play in the Introduction. There are fundamentally different accounts of the Elizabethan constitution, some of which have recently severely diminished the Privy Council’s significance. In detail, the Introduction examines those divergent conceptions and shows, in a wholly original way, how they were reconciled. It locates the Privy Council at the heart of this novel interpretation of the Elizabethan constitution, with reference to the role of the queen and to the deployment of the royal prerogative. The remainder of the Introduction consists of thematic essays demonstrating how the material presented in Parts I and II augments and revises historical knowledge, in the process re-affirming the supreme importance of the Elizabethan Privy Council, properly understood
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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