Email this article Il giudice Wyndham e gli spettacoli per l’intrattenimento di Elisabetta I a Norwich
Abstract
EN
The fabrication of a popery charge, which in August 1578 Edward Rokewood was subjected to while hosting Queen Elizabeth in the East Anglia, has been dubiously dealt with in the field of gender studies (Dovey, 1996; Brownlow, 2003) or overrated by historians of Puritanism to corroborate how the queen’s Privy Council ruled the kingdom through a manipulation of her weak will and female simple-mindedness (MacCulloch, 1986; Collinson, 2007). My paper proposes to substantiate how the intrigue against Rokewood arose from a wider social group of officers than the Lord Chamberlain Sussex and the royal favourite Leicester’s clique. Some days after the papist had been jailed in the castle of Norwich, mayor and aldermen commissioned public speeches and a composite biblical pageantry which, though allusively, both staged Rokewood’s conspiracy in favour of the Spanish king’s invasion and urged Elizabeth to inflict a death penalty. But the queen did not only turn a deaf ear to these pressures, presiding over the trial proceedings to get a time of forced reform for Rokewood. Some letters from the judge of assizes Francis Wyndham will help me to suggest that she was nor manipulated neither prevented from seeing that the case had been invented by the municipal corporation to advoke their bishop’s means of control and persecution of dissent.
IT
L’invenzione di un’accusa di papismo, che ad agosto del 1578 Edward Rokewood subisce mentre ospita la regina Elisabetta nella regione orientale dell’Anglia, è discussa con grande scetticismo nel settore dei gender studies (Dovey, 1996, pp. 54-55; Brownlow, 2003, pp. 11-13), oppure sopravvalutata da storici della cultura puritana convinti che il Privy Council tenga le redini del regno manipolando volontà e credulità della regina (MacCulloch, 1986, pp. 218-219; Collinson, 2007, p. 131). Questo paper si propone di documentare come la macchinazione ai danni di Rokewood si estenda ben oltre la cerchia del ciambellano di corte Sussex o del favorito regio Leicester. Infatti, alcuni giorni dopo che il papista veniva imprigionato a Norwich, la fanatica municipalità commissiona orazioni pubbliche ed uno spettacolo di sacre rappresentazioni che, sia pure in maniera allusiva, drammatizzano come Rokewood cospiri a favore dello sbarco di Filippo II sull’isola e istigano Elisabetta a comminare una condanna a morte. La destinataria non solo resiste alle pressioni giustizialiste, ottenendo che il processo si concluda con un periodo di arresto ‘riabilitativo’. Alcune lettere del giudice di assise mi aiuteranno a segnalare come, a dispetto della corrente storiografia, Elisabetta non è né manipolata né ignora che il caso di eresia sia stato inventato per avocare il potere di sorveglianza e punizione del dissenso che il vescovo è titolato ad esercitare nella diocesi.
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