The rule of moderation
Subtitle: violence, religion, and the politics of restraint in early modern England
By: Ethan H. Shagan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 381
ISBN-13: 9780521119726
Subjects: Moderation; HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain; History
Description: "Why was it that whenever the Tudor-Stuart regime most loudly trumpeted its moderation, that regime was at its most vicious? This groundbreaking book argues that the ideal of moderation, so central to English history and identity, functioned as a tool of social, religious and political power. Thus The Rule of Moderation rewrites the history of early modern England, showing that many of its key developments - the via media of Anglicanism, political liberty, the development of empire and even religious toleration - were defined and defended as instances of coercive moderation, producing the 'middle way' through the forcible restraint of apparently dangerous excesses in Church, state and society. By showing that the quintessentially English quality of moderation was at heart an ideology of control, Ethan Shagan illuminates the subtle violence of English history and explains how, paradoxically, England came to represent reason, civility and moderation to a world it slowly conquered"--

"This book began as an attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: why was it that whenever the Tudor-Stuart regime most loudly trumpeted its moderation, that regime was at its most vicious? The question had first occurred to me in the context of Henry VIII's remarkable, simultaneous execution of three Catholics and three Protestants in July 1540 as a (literally) flamboyant statement of the Church of England's moderation. But over years of teaching English history, I found that the question seemed to recur in a wide variety of contexts: the claim to punish religious dissidents for their conduct but not to make windows into men's souls; the use of writs of the peace to enforce order and punish offenders without resorting to the courts; claims for the moderation of the English empire compared to the excesses of New Spain; laws promoting religious toleration that established new penalties for blasphemy. The common thread running through these examples was that they were all cases where power was authorised and even amplified by its limitation. My deceptively simple question, I realised, led deep into the ideological heart of early modern England. My first answer to this question was that moderation was an intrinsically relational and comparative ethical framework, so that every claim to the moderate centre involved the construction and vilification of extremists on the margins"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Part I. Moderate Foundations: Introduction; 1. The bridle of moderation; Part II. Moderate Churches: 2. Violence and the via media in the reign of Henry VIII; 3. Conformist moderation; 4. Puritan moderation; Part III. Moderate Rule: 5. English expansion and the empire of moderation; 6. Social moderation and the governance of the middle sort; 7. Moderate freedom in the English Revolution; 8. Toleration became moderate in seventeenth-century England; Conclusion.