Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England

Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England PDF Author: Meg Lota Brown
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004476830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England examines the responses of John Donne and his contemporaries to post-Reformation debate about authority and interpretation. It argues that the legal and epistemological principles, as well as the narrative practices, of casuistry provided an important resource for those caught in the welter of conflicting laws and religions. The first two chapters explore the political, historical, and theological contexts of casuistry, locating Donne in debates about the limits of reason and the relativity of law and ethics. Chapter three addresses Donne's concern with problems of moral decision and action, of knowledge and definition, in five of his prose works. Chapter four examines ways in which his verse assimilates and wittily subverts casuists' responses to epistemological and linguistic uncertainty. The study is particularly useful for literary critics, intellectual historians, and theologians.

Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England

Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England PDF Author: Meg Lota Brown
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004476830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book

Book Description
Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England examines the responses of John Donne and his contemporaries to post-Reformation debate about authority and interpretation. It argues that the legal and epistemological principles, as well as the narrative practices, of casuistry provided an important resource for those caught in the welter of conflicting laws and religions. The first two chapters explore the political, historical, and theological contexts of casuistry, locating Donne in debates about the limits of reason and the relativity of law and ethics. Chapter three addresses Donne's concern with problems of moral decision and action, of knowledge and definition, in five of his prose works. Chapter four examines ways in which his verse assimilates and wittily subverts casuists' responses to epistemological and linguistic uncertainty. The study is particularly useful for literary critics, intellectual historians, and theologians.

The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England

The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England PDF Author: Mark Fortier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317036670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Elizabeth and James, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Bacon and Ellesmere, Perkins and Laud, Milton and Hobbes-this begins a list of early modern luminaries who write on 'equity'. In this study Mark Fortier addresses the concept of equity from early in the sixteenth century until 1660, drawing on the work of lawyers, jurists, politicians, kings and parliamentarians, theologians and divines, poets, dramatists, colonists and imperialists, radicals, royalists, and those who argue on gender issues. He examines how writers in all these groups make use of the word equity and its attendant notions. Equity, he argues, is a powerful concept in the period; he analyses how notions of equity play a prominent part in discourses that have or seek to have influence on major social conflicts and issues in early modern England. Fortier here maps the actual and extensive presence of equity in the intellectual life of early modern England. In so doing, he reveals how equity itself acts as an umbrella term for a wide array of ideas, which defeats any attempt to limit narrowly the meaning of the term. He argues instead that there is in early modern England a distinct and striking culture of equity characterized and strengthened by the diversity of its genealogy and its applications. This culture manifests itself, inter alia, in the following major ways: as a basic component, grounded in the old and new testaments, of a model for Christian society; as the justification for a justice system over and above the common law; as an imperative for royal prerogative; as a free ranging subject for poetry and drama; as a nascent grounding for broadly cast social justice; as a rallying cry for revolution and individual rights and freedoms. Working from an empirical account of the many meanings of equity over time, the author moves from a historical understanding of equity to a theorization of equity in its multiplicity. A profoundly literary study, this book also touches on matters of legal an

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England PDF Author: Susannah Brietz Monta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521844987
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A comprehensive comparison of the representations of early modern Protestant and Catholic martyrs.

Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England

Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England PDF Author: Todd Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192582348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Drawing upon a myriad of literary and political texts, Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England charts how some of the Stuart period's major challenges to governance—the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one's civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament—evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects alike imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, Todd Butler here investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the various ways that early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this continuing immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, Butler examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, Philip Massinger, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth-century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with similarly close readings of religious and political affairs that similarly return our attention to how early Stuart writers of all sorts understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, oaths, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how—or even if—one can freely think.

John Donne's Professional Lives

John Donne's Professional Lives PDF Author: David Colclough
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9780859917759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
New studies offer a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career, making a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings. During his life, John Donne occupied a range of professional positions, in all of which he produced writings considered by his contemporaries to be worthy of interest, collection and annotation. Donne's lifetime also coincided with the period during which the notion of the profession became increasingly significant. This volume makes a strong argument for the importance of Donne's professional writings to our understanding of his oeuvre and of the cultureof late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Studying in depth his remarkable use of a wide range of terms and even whole vocabularies - legal, theological, and medical, among others - it shows how Donne moulded his identity as a professional intellectual with the languages that were at hand. A tightly focussed series of essays by scholars of international reputation and younger experts in the field, John Donne's Professional Lives contains new discoveries and fresh interpretations. It offers a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career and makes a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings.Contributors: JAMES CANNON, DAVID CUNNINGTON, LOUISA. KNAFLA, PETER MCCULLOUGH, JESSICA MARTIN, JEREMY MAULE, MARY MORRISSEY, STEPHEN PENDER, JEANNE SHAMI, ALISON SHELL, JOHANN P. SOMMERVILLE.DAVID COLCLOUGH is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reading Humility in Early Modern England

Reading Humility in Early Modern England PDF Author: Jennifer Clement
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317071166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.

Argument and Authority in Early Modern England

Argument and Authority in Early Modern England PDF Author: Conal Condren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521859080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
A radical reappraisal of the character of moral and political theory in early modern England.

Conscience in Early Modern English Literature

Conscience in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Abraham Stoll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This is an examination of how early modern poets attempt to capture the experience of being in the grip of conscience.

Donne's Augustine

Donne's Augustine PDF Author: Katrin Ettenhuber
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. Donne's Augustine examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Katrin Ettenhuber argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. She presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies. Donne's Augustine is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theological sources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage. Donne's Augustine makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the larger reading and writing culture of Renaissance England, and of the religious debates and controversies in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Centered on the Word

Centered on the Word PDF Author: Daniel W. Doerksen
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138436
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
The preoccupation of the English Church with the word of scripture during Elizabethan and Jacobian times had both powerful and subtle effects of the literature produced during and immediately after that period, say scholars of English from North America and the Antipodes. They examines works from the 1590s--the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, to 1652--just after the death of Charles I--by both well known and little known authors. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).