Royal Voices Language and Power in Tudor England

"This book explores the notion that the construction and representation of Tudor royal power was, in part, a textual process: a combination of verbal and visual strategies through which the magnificence of monarchy could be indexed and legitimated. Using concepts from sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics, the book applies the notion of enregisterment to investigate the characteristics of a 'royal voice' in authentic royal texts (letters and proclamation), and to explore the extent to which these visual and linguistic features were salient to, and appropriated by, Tudor subjects in their own letters and non-literary publications, such as historical chronicles. The study applies corpus-based methods to manuscript and printed materials, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative close reading, to describe and interpret how the texts construct monarchic power. The analysis identifies developments across the Tudor period, which are considered both in light of the changing socio-political context and the shifts in orality and documentary culture attested in the sixteenth century"--