Graduation Year
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
History
Major Professor
Cornelis Boterbloem, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Frances Ramos, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Emily Jones, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Golfo Alexopoulos, Ph.D.
Keywords
Book Culture, Propaganda, Eighty Year’s War, Early Modern Britain
Abstract
In the late sixteenth century, England’s political culture was engaged in a heated debate over that kingdom’s participation in the Dutch Revolt. Across the Channel, predominantly Protestant Dutch rebels had risen up in revolt against their Catholic overlord, King Philip II of Spain. The English people, linked to the Dutch by longstanding cultural, economic, and religious ties, largely sympathized with the rebels. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and, after his death, his stepson, Robert Deveraux, Earl of Essex, sponsored extensive campaigns of print propaganda to influence their fellow subjects to support an active English military intervention in the Revolt. They were countered both by English Catholic exiled authors and, at times, by more cautious elements at court led by William Cecil and his son, Robert Cecil. This dissertation examines the networks that produced propaganda both for and against English intervention in the Revolt along with the major themes of that propaganda. Chapters each examine a particular theme while progressing chronologically. The early chapters discuss the historic ties between England, Spain, and the Low Countries while later chapters cover propaganda produced in the 1590s when English armies were actively fighting in the Netherlands
Scholar Commons Citation
Swierczynski, Michael, "Proud and Mischievous Designs: Elizabethan Propaganda of the Dutch Revolt" (2023). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/9933
