The first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English Portraiture which investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre.

• Introduction


• 1: English Portraiture in Context


• 2: Locating the Public


• 3: Provincial Painters


• 4: Painters' Resources


• 5: Heraldry and Portraiture


• 6: The Provincial Vocabulary: 'Props' and their Meaning


• 7: Varieties of Regional Experience


• Conclusion


• Bibliography

Robert Tittler has researched, taught, and published for over forty years, producing ten books and some fifty scholarly articles and essays on the urban, political, social, economic, and cultural history of the Tudor and early Stuart eras. He prefers to work at the edges of his subjects rather in their centres, hoping to knit those subjects together with the edges of adjacent issues. His studies of town halls and political authority (Architecture and Power, 1991), of the impact of the Reformation on urban political life (The Reformation and the Towns, 1998), the experiences of individual urban residents in relation to the whole (Townspeople and Nation, 2001), or of portraiture and civic identity (The Face of the City, 2007), all work towards those ends, as does this present book.