Angela Andreani – författare

This is the first book-length study of the fascinating life of the clergyman and scholar of Welsh descent Meredith Hanmer (c.1545–1604). Hanmer became involved in the key scholarly controversies of his day, from the place of the Elizabethan Church in Christian history to the role of the 1581 Jesuit mission to England led by Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. As an army preacher in Ireland during the Nine Years War, Hanmer campaigned with the most acclaimed soldiers of his day. He nurtured connections with prominent intellectuals of his time and with the key figures of colonial government. His own career as a clergyman was colourful, involving bitter disputes with his parishioners and recurring aspersions on his character. Surprisingly, no study to date has centred on this intriguing character. The surviving evidence for Hanmer’s life and activities is unusually rich, comprising his published writings and a large body of under-exploited manuscript material. Drawing extensively on archival evidence scattered across a wide number of repositories, Dr. Andreani’s book contextualises Hanmer’s clerical activities and wide-ranging scholarship, elucidates his previously little understood career, and thus enriches our understanding of life, politics, and scholarship in the Elizabethan church.

This is the first book-length study of the fascinating life of the clergyman and scholar of Welsh descent Meredith Hanmer (c.1545–1604). Hanmer became involved in the key scholarly controversies of his day, from the place of the Elizabethan Church in Christian history to the role of the 1581 Jesuit mission to England led by Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. As an army preacher in Ireland during the Nine Years War, Hanmer campaigned with the most acclaimed soldiers of his day. He nurtured connections with prominent intellectuals of his time and with the key figures of colonial government. His own career as a clergyman was colourful, involving bitter disputes with his parishioners and recurring aspersions on his character. Surprisingly, no study to date has centred on this intriguing character. The surviving evidence for Hanmer’s life and activities is unusually rich, comprising his published writings and a large body of under-exploited manuscript material. Drawing extensively on archival evidence scattered across a wide number of repositories, Dr. Andreani’s book contextualises Hanmer’s clerical activities and wide-ranging scholarship, elucidates his previously little understood career, and thus enriches our understanding of life, politics, and scholarship in the Elizabethan church.

This book investigates the work of the Elizabethan secretariat during the fascinating decade of the 1590s, when, after the death of Francis Walsingham, the place of principal secretary remained vacant for six years. Through original sources in the collections of the State Papers and Cecil Papers, this study reconstructs the activities of the clerks and secretaries who worked in close contact with the Queen at court. An estimated fifty people, many unidentified, saw to every minute detail of the production of official documents and letters in an array of offices, rooms and locations within and outside the court. The book introduces the staff of the Elizabethan writing offices as a community of shared knowledge with a privileged and constant access to papers of state, working behind the scenes of court display and high politics. While the production of the state papers is explored as a means to re-construct the functioning of the inner mechanisms of state, it also provides a lens through which to access the knowledge of the administration in a pre-bureaucratic age.