Recycling regicide: Reprinting fabian philipps's No Man of Blood and John Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

This paper will examine the communications networks of two polemical pamphlets from England in 1649, the year of King Charles I's trial and execution. A communications network describes all individuals and processes involved in the publication of ephemeral pamphlets: author, publisher, and printer in publication and manufacturing, booksellers in distribution, and readers in reception and survival. Each step along the process of publication is fueled by external influences whether intellectual, social, political, legal, religious, or commercial pressures. Royalist Fabian Philipps writes No Man of Blood, a pamphlet memorializing the recently executed king as a martyr and innocent party in the war initiated by Parliament. John Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is written earlier in the year during the king's trial. Milton's pamphlet works to reconcile the English people to the possibility of deposing and executing their king. Both pamphlets undergo a series of reprintings in which the textual and paratextual differences among each successive edition demonstrates England's dynamic political atmosphere and the influences underlying each decision to reprint. The successive communications networks for the editions of each pamphlet carry the imprint of its predecessors, recycling recent history and applying it to current political circumstances.