The politics of court scandal in early modern England

"This is the first detailed study of the political significance of the seventeenth century's most notorious and sensational court scandal, the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The book rejects earlier approaches to the history of court scandal, assuming neither that scandal inevitably undermined royal authority nor that courtiers' salacious behaviour was politically irrelevant. Instead, the book adopts a multilayered, interdisciplinary approach to the Overbury affair and its complex political meanings. It explores the factional politics that made and destroyed Overbury and his murderers, reconstructs the news culture through which information about the scandal circulated, analyses the creation and composition of the early Stuart 'public', and decodes the representations of the affair that were produced and consumed during 1615-16 and in subsequent decades. By situating the Overbury case in both short- and long-term political contexts, the book suggests that court scandal deserves a place among the cultural origins of the English revolution."—BOOK JACKET.