The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660

This is the first detailed study of the political significance of the seventeenth-century’s most notorious and sensational court scandal - the Overbury murder. The book challenges earlier approaches to the history of court scandal, rejecting both the assumption that it inevitably undermined royal authority and the tendency to dismiss scandal as politically insignificant. The book adopts a multi-layered, 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 both in short- and long-term political contexts, the book offers a reading of court scandal’s place in the cultural origins of the English revolution.