Power and anxiety in Kett's Rebellion, 1549: the role of drama, masculinity, and festivals in shaping resistance to socio-economic change

Cultural historians have firmly established a link between popular culture and subversive challenges to elites by broader elements of society utilizing festivals, religious traditions, and entertainment as discursive tools in the late medieval and early modern periods. However, this framework has not yet been systematically applied to many of the specific uprisings and rebellions that occurred from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Scholarship studying these events primarily interpret them through economic and social lenses, focusing on the direct causes for rebellions, such as enclosure or religious changes. These interpretations provide valuable insight into the conditions inciting widespread unrest, but they assume an external consistency, seriousness, and rationality as the primary factors guiding resistance among large swaths of the population. Instead, this study seeks to focus on the internally consistent logic guiding the construction of gendered and political identities in the context of popular forms of entertainment. Urban and rural individuals alike participated in festivals, watched performances, and feasted to celebrate fantastical events, idealized lives of saints, and other events with a tenuous connection to reality. This is apparent in the actions of the individuals participating in Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 East Anglia, who interpreted the problems of enclosure and economic changes and responded to those challenges through this discourse. Examining the rebellion in this context provides valuable insight into the construction of mentalités in sixteenth-century East Anglia and provides an explanation for the apparent inconsistencies, absurdities, and contradictions in the rebels' behavior during the summer of 1549.