CREMS Seminar and Welcome Reception - An ‘Aristotelian Moment’: Democracy in Early Modern England.

The paper asks whether or not English people living in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries knew the term ‘democracy’, in what contexts they did so, and what they meant by it. Utilising new digital technology, it finds that the word ‘democracy’ in the Aristotelian sense of the term – as government by the many as opposed to the one or the few – entered the English printed vernacular over the course of the sixteenth century and that from the 1590s it became a fairly familiar term of print culture. Building on this analysis, the chapter then outlines some of the practices from everyday urban politics that clearly corresponded to and resonated with these conceptions of democracy in printed texts. Taking these two aspects of political culture together – the texts of vernacular print and the tasks of urban citizenship – the paper argues that the linguistic and institutional imprint of democracy was more significant than historians have recognised.