Self-Love and the Transformation of Obligation to Self-Control in Early Modern British Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 353-401
Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Self Control ◽  
British Society

The Undoing of a Man: Cuckoldry in Heywood's Edward IV

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-267
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Social Construct

Manhood was a complex social construct in early modern England. Males could not simply mature or grow from boys to men. Instead, they had to assert or prove they were men in multiple ways, such as growing a beard, behaving courageously in battle, exercising self-control in walking, talking, weeping, eating, and drinking, pursuing manly interests, exhibiting manly behaviors, avoiding interests or behaviors typically ascribed to women, marrying a woman and providing for her physical, sexual, and spiritual needs, and living and dying as a faithful Christian. Once a male became a “man” in the eyes of others, his efforts shifted from “making” himself manly to maintaining or defending his reputation as a “true man.” All men could undermine their manhood through their own actions or inactions, but the married man could also lose his reputation through his wife's infidelity. Numerous literary husbands in early modern literature live anxiously with the knowledge they might suffer a cuckold's humiliation and shame. Matthew Shore, who “treasures” his wife to a fault in Thomas Heywood's two-part play Edward IV, is an exceptional example of such a husband. This critical reading of Edward IV explores the complexity of manhood in Heywood's day by showing various males trying to assert or defend their manhood; explaining why husbands had reasons to fear cuckoldry; analyzing how Jane Shore's infidelity affects her husband; following Matthew Shore's journey from trusting husband to distrusting, bitter cuckold, to forgiving husband; and examining his seemingly inexplicable death at the end of the play.

Corruption and the Ethical Standards of British Public Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Public Life ◽  
British Society ◽  
Ethical Standards ◽  
Municipal Level

This chapter goes deeper into a period that is often seen as one in which early modern “old corruption” was finally eliminated in Britain: namely, the period from 1880–1914. It argues that anticorruption measures and developments have often been held to account for this change. This chapter then changes perspective and, based on the author’s own analysis of local politics, makes clear that at the local and municipal level corruption remained a problem in Britain, thereby strengthening the argument that the effectiveness of certain ambitious anticorruption laws and the “end of corruption” in modern British society depends very much on one’s perspective.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Lecky
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
British Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Public Markets ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Modern Nation State

The Introduction argues that in early modern Britain maps of sovereign power jostled against geographies of mundane resistance in ways that could marginalize bastions of social control. This spatial incongruity sprang from the practice of everyday life, through which consumers appropriated informational media in opportunistic ways. This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by showing that laureate poetry by writers such as Jonson and Spenser circulated alongside pocket maps and other forms of cheap print in public markets. Together, these texts inspired new paradigms of collectivity for a British society on the cusp of transitioning into a modern nation-state.

Who Stood to Gain from Colonialism? A Case Study of Early Modern European Colonialism in the Caribbean

Itinerario ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Klas Rönnbäck
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
British Society ◽  
Decisive Effect ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
British Colonies

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx considered British colonies to be a net burden on British society. Ever since the issue has been a controversial one and has received a great deal of attention from scholars, not least thanks to the publication of Eric Williams's book “Capitalism and Slavery”. To a large extent the debate has been concerned with the issue of whether the profits from colonialism were large enough to have a decisive effect upon, or at least contribute to, the industrialisation of Britain and/or other countries in Europe.

Introduction: Female Fury and the Masculine Spirit of Vengeance

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Lesel Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Male Subjectivity ◽  
And Function

This chapter examines revenge narratives in relation to gender, asking whether depictions of vengeance reinforce conservative gender roles, interrogate the ‘masculine’ values that society prizes, or establish new ways of conceptualizing women and men. It demonstrates that while revenge is frequently conceptualized as a quintessential masculine activity, it is simultaneously seen to unleash the female Furies and the violent, ‘feminine’ emotions that threaten a man’s reason and self-control. It surveys scholarly debate about female avengers, asking whether they should be interpreted as honorary men, heroes in their own right, monstrous inversions of gender norms, or conduits through which male subjectivity is formed. The chapter also examines grief, demonstrating how women use lamentation in ancient Greek literature and medieval Icelandic sagas to express grievances, directing revenge action and, at times, influencing wider political events. It argues, however, that female lamentation becomes discredited in later periods and detached from the revenge process. In early modern literature, for example, the revenger is typically also the mourner, whose grief inhibits the revenge process. The change in lamentation’s status and function has wider implications for women’s roles and for the gendering of the male revenger.

scholarly journals Peace with Pirates? Maghrebi Maritime Combat, Diplomacy, and Trade in English Periodical News, 1622–1714

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Cutter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
British Society ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

Commonly represented in contemporary texts and modern historiographical accounts as a dangerous and alien region, characterised by piracy and barbarism, the history of the early modern Maghreb and the cultural impact it had on British society is one highly limited by indirect sources, cultural, political, and religious biases, and the distorting influence of Orientalist and colonial historiography. Historians have drawn on a wide range of popular media and government-held archival material, each with its own limitations, but one important corpus has been neglected. Drawn from up-to-date and trusted sources and distributed to vast audiences from a wide range of social groups, periodical news publications provide a vast and fruitful body of sources for evaluating popular and elite English viewpoints on Maghrebi piracy. This paper draws upon a corpus of 3385 news items comprising over 360,000 words relating to the Maghreb and its people, drawn from Stuart and Republican English news publications, with a view towards examining the discourse and reality around Maghrebi maritime combat, diplomact and trade in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. To what extent did maritime combat dominate coverage of the Maghreb, over other social, political and military events? Why did news writers use the word ‘pirate’ so infrequently to describe Maghrebi ships? Was Maghrebi piracy chaotic and unfettered, or did peace treaties and consular presence lead to stable trade relations? Were Maghrebi economies seen to be fundamentally built on naval predation, or was real benefit available from peaceful engagement with the Maghrebi states? Examining these and other questions from English news coverage, this paper argues that the material in English periodical news is generally consistent with what we know of the military, diplomatic and economic conditions of the time, surprisingly neutral in tone with a possible emphasis on positive stories when dealing with British–Maghrebi relations, and increasingly after the Restoration played a significant role in influencing British popular discourse.

Early Modern British Religious History

2017 ◽  
Vol 97 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 346-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Royal
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
British Society ◽  
Geographical Scope

This article reviews the recent trajectories in the study of early modern British religious history, arguing that the modes of cultural history and the rejection of a teleological narrative have opened up new topics and rejuvenated perennial debates while putting older ones to rest. Consequently, a fuller understanding of the long reach and fundamental place of reform within British society has precipitated a “religious turn” within early modern British studies. The article ends with a look at two promising trends: the use of new types of primary sources and a wider geographical scope.

scholarly journals "Acquire and Beget a Temperance": The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Gillian Chell Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Control Comparison ◽  
The One ◽  
The Faerie Queene

<p>Shakespeare's Hamlet, like Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQII and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQII, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts "Know Thyself", "Nothing in Excess' and "Think Mortal Thoughts." To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQII makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQII and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius' apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from "false prudence" as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, "this canker of our nature," he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQII and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance.</p>

scholarly journals Masculinizing the Nation: Gender Ideologies in Traditional Korea and in the 1890s–1900s Korean Enlightenment Discourse

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 1029-1065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Tikhonov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
Other Hand

This paper deals with ideal masculine types in the gender discourse of Korea's modernizing nationalists during the late 1890s and early 1900s. It begins by outlining the main gender stereotypes of Korea's traditional neo-Confucian society, and it argues that old Korea's manhood norms were bifurcated along class lines. On one hand, fighting prowess was accepted as a part of the masculinity pattern in the premodern society of the commoners. On the other hand, the higher classes' visions of manhood emphasized self-control and adherence to moral and ritual norms. The paper shows how both premodern standards of masculinity provided a background for indigenizing the mid-nineteenth century European middle-class ideal of “nationalized” masculinity—disciplined, self-controlled, sublimating the sexual impulses and channeling them toward the “nobler national goals,” and highly militarized—in early modern Korea.

‘richesse in fassone and in fairness’: Marriage, Manhood and Sartorial Splendour for Sixteenth-century Scottish Kings

2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-396
Author(s):  
Lucinda H. S. Dean
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
James Iv ◽  
The Moment

Marriage was a prominent ‘life-stage’ ritual linked to achievement of the hegemonic manly state in the early modern period: it was associated with self-control and was seen as a stabilising force against the ‘follies of youth’. James IV (1488–1513), James V (1513–1542) and James VI (1567–1625) came to the throne as minors and their weddings provided particularly potent opportunities for shaping their identity both at home and abroad. Clothing was a crucial element of the social dialogue performed by both men and women in late medieval and early modern Europe. Dress, of the royal person and of others, was a mode of display in which all three monarchs invested heavily at the moment of their weddings. By offering a comparative analysis of the investment in sartorial splendour and the use of dress and personal adornment through a gendered lens, this article demonstrates how clothing and adornments were used to make statements about both manhood and royal status by three sixteenth-century Stewart kings attempting to secure their place in the homosocial hierarchy.

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