This contests Norbert Eliass view of the civilizing process. It argues that in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the promotion of gentler manners worked in the service of military aggression. Martial virtue was promoted against the threat of effeminacy and corruption, while poets celebrated the humanity of brutal victors in contemporary wars. The Fast and Thanksgiving services of the Church sancitifed the violence of the war zone while discouraging brutality in daily life. Fears about the corrupting influence of war news were countered by ideal models of martial virtue. A new theory of the sublime was developed, which claimed that an imaginative engagement with representations of violence could have a humanizing effect.

This chapter sets the Laudian view of the Sabbath within their wider account of the feasts and festivals of the church and their account of the church’s capacity to constitute holy times as well as places. The Laudians’ opposition to puritan sabbatarianism is thus explained within their wider position, which enabled them to diminish the significance of the Sabbath attributed by the puritans as the only day marked down for worship by scripture, while simultaneously exalting the role and status of the other holy days denominated by the church, which were thus placed on an at least equal footing with the Sabbath. It was a position adumbrated in conscientious opposition to what was presented as the crude scripturalism and divisive effects of puritan sabbatarianism.

This chapter looks at elective monarchy and also the way dynasties interacted with powers of a non-dynastic nature. The papacy is a notable example of elective monarchy but the most important case of elective kingship is the Holy Roman Empire, where the long-term dynasties of the tenth to thirteenth centuries never completely eroded the elective principle, and where the later Middle Ages saw seven different dynasties in power. Although the Church offered the chance of ecclesiastical office to members of the aristocracy throughout Europe, the ruling dynasties did not follow their practice of placing younger sons in the Church to any extent, though royal women were placed in monasteries. Republics, though rare, could be found in Venice and Iceland, and embryonic republican institutions arose in many of the larger cities, and this often led to conflict between towns and their nominal dynastic overlords, notably in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors and the Lombard Leagues of northern Italy. Relations might also be tense between dynasties and the kingdoms they ruled, where the community of the realm, perhaps organized in representative estates, might well decide it had its own interests distinct from and possibly antagonistic to its dynastic sovereigns.