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Despite a long and active career as Elizabeth I's tournament champion, instigator of the Accession Day tournaments, Steward of the Queen's manor at Woodstock, Master of the Armoury and Knight of the Garter, Lee remained a gentleman, howbeit one of the elite courtier gentlemen who served Elizabeth I. The only studies of Lee's life are the brief monograph produced by his descendant, Viscount Dillon of Ditchley in 1906, and E.K. Chambers' Sir Henry Lee: an Elizabethan Portrait (1936). Lee's name frequently appears in major works on Elizabethan England, yet despite its dated nature and factual errors, Chambers' work remains the sole secondary source of reference for Lee's life. A new study of Lee's long life offers an opportunity to examine the values, hopes, expectations and frustrations of an elite Elizabethan gentleman, with others of his social class. Sir Henry Lee also had talents that singled him out from his counterparts. His contemporary fame was based upon his performance in the tournaments, an activity that was becoming outmoded as training for war, but still, in the eyes of the public, represented the best of chivalric virtues. This study will attempt to analyse how tournaments developed in late Elizabethan England, the uses to which they could be put, and how Lee saw the role of chivalric values they embodied. This study seeks to describe and appraise Lee's life and career in its entirety, using a wide range of primary sources, many not available to Chambers. These sources will be used in the context of recent scholarship on Elizabeth's England as well as what remains of Lee's material culture, in an attempt to understand the life of an understudied and underrated Elizabethan gentleman.

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This thesis examines the place of fruit in early-modern English culture and society, and in particular as a dimension of its response to the West Indian environment. Only a small minority encountered exotic fruit in this period. But in patterns of attraction and resistance to these immigrants from the colonial periphery we may find important markers for wider kinds of cultural change. The first section of this study, entitled ‘Exotic Fruits and the English Mind’, considers the impact of tropical fruits upon the English psyche. In the <i>Essay Concerning Human Understanding</i> (1690), John Locke, despite having no first hand knowledge of the New World and its fruit, chose the pineapple as his symbol for a thing which could only be known through direct sense experience. Locke exemplifies how tropical fruit were first naturalised within England in its intellectual life. The second chapter, ‘Exotic Fruits and the English Body’, assesses the culinary, dietary and medical discourses which shaped patterns of response to exotic fruit as objects of actual consumption. ‘Exotic Fruits in English Soil’ next eliminates how the cultivation of tropical fruit became an issue for horticulture and natural history in England. ‘The Rise and Fall of Exotic Fruit in England’ finally examines the nineteenth-century climax of the production of tropical fruits with the British Isles, an era in which the pineapple became almost a national symbol. Through the study of the English response to exotic fruit we may explore how metropolitan culture responded to the new worlds opened up by trade and colonization. England’s transformation form an insular, inward-looking nation to a sophisticated, outward-looking world power is mirrored through the cultivation and consumption of exotic fruits, and in particular through the pineapple fetish. To paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, fruit are good to think about.

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In The Mystery of the Supernatural (1967), Henri de Lubac suggests that the relegation of aspects of experience regarded as supernatural into a distinct conceptual realm played an important role in the secularization of Western thought. This dissertation endeavours to test de Lubac's contention in a particular cultural context - that of Renaissance England. Toward that end, the dissertation studies the use of the word and the concept "supernatural" in six "canonical" works written in England during the period, c. 1590 - c. 1610. The chapters on individual works are preceded by an initial chapter which prepares the ground for subsequent discussion by introducing themes which are treated in the remainder of the dissertation. Relevant aspects are outlined of Thomas Aquinas's foundational understanding of "supernatural," in which natural and supernatural movements were subsumed in a greater unity, and the theological basis for the use of analogical language is discussed. The use of analogical language in the description of created reality is shown to have been supplanted by the onset of an ideal for the unequivocal use of words. The thought of Julia Kristeva is used to explain the association we will find between the use of the word and concept "supernatural" and the appearance of highly-controverted feminine figures. The discussion employs Of Chastity and Power (1989) by Philippa Berry which draws upon Kristeva's thought to treat particular circumstances prevailing in Elizabethan England. A survey is included of uses of the word "supernatural" in Great Britain from 1500 to 1650, which is supplemented by an appendix. Chapters are then devoted to: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well and Macbeth; John Donne, the First Anniversary; and John Webster, The White Devil. The result of the detailed discussion is to validate de Lubac's contention that the word "supernatural" played an important role at a time of radical cultural change. In England the period of c. 1590 to c. 1610 saw a general cultural crisis of meaning, value and identity in which important shifts in the meaning of "supernatural" took place. During the period, the old analogical world-view, in which the natural and supernatural operations were understood to be part of a greater unity, underwent a crisis in England, which ended in its demise. A compromise constructed by the Elizabethan settlement was found wanting as a source of meaning and identity. A complex unity gave way to a simple dualism, leaving the way open to the conceptual revolution of the seventeenth century, that would depend on a total separation of natural and supernatural.

This thesis explores various aspects of the grand jury and grand jurors in seventeenth century England based on the case study of the grand jury in the North Riding of Yorkshire. A central theme is an examination of the nature of ‘substance’ and ‘sufficiency’ required for the grand jury, and it focuses on the grand jury’s membership and its relationship with superior magistrates. The first part concentrates on perceptions of the grand jury expressed in magistrates’ words and actions through charges to the grand jury expressed in magistrates’ words and actions and a lawsuit in the Star Chamber. These reveal justices’ ambivalent attitudes towards the grand jury, which rested on an unstable balance between trust and suspicion, between independence and subordination. Underlying this was the problem of recruiting sufficient jurors. The actual composition of the grand jury is discussed in Part II. The analysis is based on a systematic survey of grand jury panels returned to the quarter sessions between 1605 and 1705, excluding the Interregnum. Cross-sectional examinations of national and local tax assessments, and parochial office-holding, lead to a conclusion that the North Riding grand jury was comprised of a broad social spectrum of the middling sort of people between the magistrates and the non-rate-paying population: a mixture of the ‘subordinate inhabitants’ of the villages and towns, and more minor members who occasionally, and often indirectly, shared various local responsibilities with them. The substantial inhabitants served as a core of the grand jury, and were constantly returned to the office as foremen and regular jurors at least until the mid-1690s. These people were also actively involved in the parish administration as churchwardens, overseers, or constables. The sheer number of those involved in jury service quarterly each year, and the unique balance between continuity and diversity in its membership, indicates the widening potential reach of the state’s authority.