English Publicists of the Mid-17th Century in Spatial and Social Dimension

The article is devoted to English authors who wrote propaganda texts during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century and attempts to analyze them as a socio-professional group. For this purpose, a prosopographical database was compiled for a group of 127 authors. In this group, 61 authors were royalists and 66 were supporters of Parliament, or parliamentarians. The database includes basic biographical and social information as well as the information on their education and movements. Network analysis is used to trace the correlation of the pre-selected attributes. As a result, four approximate collective portraits emerged: parliamentary authors who favored an agreement with King Charles I; parliamentary authors who favored the king’s execution; royalist authors with a similar life trajectory; royalist authors who differed from the third group in a set of social attributes. While selecting the attributes, belonging to a certain generation turned out to be the most significant factor in choosing a certain political position. The oldest generation of authors, regardless of where they were educated, almost unequivocally supported the king. The authors who studied at the University of Cambridge in the 1620s and in the Inns of Court in the 1630s usually supported the Parliament. It was connected with the educational policies and processes that were different in educational institutions in England in the pre-revolutionary decades. In addition, the network analysis shows that of the four identified groups of authors, the second one (radical parliamentary authors) accounted for the largest number of texts published in that period, which pointed to their weak public support and the need to fight more actively for their political line. The spatial study showed only weak trends affecting political engagement. The information regarding authors’ birthplaces speaks rather about the evenness of the level of social mobility in England in the first half of the 17th century. An indication of the existing political conjuncture can be seen only in a few counties. The distribution of the authors’ places of death indicates that politically active authors concentrated in the capital and in counties close to London during their lives.

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