Smuts 1987

Smuts, R. Malcolm. Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England. Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

"Caroline styles often have much closer affinities to the style sof the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries than to work completed barely a generation earlier. And these stylistic changes were symptomatic of a much more fundamental reorientation of attitudes, values, patterns of conspicuous consumption, and modes of thought and feeling." (1)

Charles as first monarch to grow up reading Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare; first since Middle Ages to spend some time in a great European court, first since Mary Tudor to marry into a Catholic dynasty of the continent and welcome a papal envoy at court (2)

historians have tended to see a strong division between Court and Country as causing the Civil War, but divisions were much messier; was no consolidated "country" culture, rather lots of local subcultures

"As paradoxical as it may sound, Stuart court culture was at once an outgrowth of the trend toward a more urbanized and cosmopolitan aristocratic society and an expression of a deep mistrust of the transformations this trend was bringing about." (8)