Impressos e as Guerras Civis Inglesas (1640-1660)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss how printed matter has been a rich field of analysis of the 17th century English Civil Wars. Through a bibliographic survey that addresses the different facets of the subject - the print profusion characteristic of the 1640s and 1650s, the issue of censorship, the impact of the press for the popularization of written culture in England and the nature of print as pamphlets and broadsides, for example, - we seek to point out ways to deal with some of the sources preserved in the collection of the bookseller George Thomason, the “Thomason Tracts”. We discuss how the rise of the public sphere in seventeenth-century England can be thought of in conjunction with the popularization of print, indicating how this opened the door to new forms of political action through writing. Considering the issue of radical performances, more particularly that of the Diggers, we demonstrate how the mobilization of a given public opinion through the manufacture and dispute of representations became part of the written performance of the group, providing an example of how issues related to the performance of collective identities were characteristic of the period of the Civil Wars.