Early Modern English Borders: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Boyi Chen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Channel Islands ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Case

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border ‘building’ was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a ‘nation’, which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a ‘state’.

Family matters and Foxe's Acts and Monuments

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Andrew Penny
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Critical Juncture ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Acts And Monuments

ABSTRACTThis essay maintains that John Foxe has been under-utilized as a source of early modern English social history. Accordingly, the mid-Tudor portions of the Acts and monuments of Foxe are examined with reference to such topics as the size of early modern families, the roles of spouses within marriage, the status of romantic love and marriage, and the treatment of children. In addition to these familiar categories, however, the essay also asks whether the protestant community of the Marian era was forming a coherent vision of the family as part of its strategy of survival, and whether the catholic authorities were aware of this and attempted to thwart its development. The possibility of a connection between the protestant emphasis on rediscovering the heart of the Christian gospel and a renewed emphasis on the biblical vision of family is raised, together with a discussion of the English reformers' concern that families not serve as hindrances in the advancement of the kingdom of God at that critical juncture in the life of the nation.

Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176
Author(s):  
James P. Bednarz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Marston ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
Public Theater

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.

From speaker innovation to lexical change

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Terttu Nevalainen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Period ◽  
New Words ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Lexical Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Applying a sociolinguistic approach to the study of neologisms, this paper discusses the actuation and diffusion of new words in Early Modern English (EModE; 1500–1700) and draws some parallels with word coining in the comparable but more recent period of Early Modern Finnish (EModF; 1810–1880). The success of this exercise ultimately depends on the data and tools available for ascertaining the status of neologisms in a broader synchronic and diachronic context. The use of historical dictionaries and digital databases shows that many words that were earlier considered particular innovations in EModE are now up for re-evaluation. Determining their actual moments of coinage and entry into the language may be beyond historical lexicology and lexicography, but the new tools make it possible to better monitor their provenance and process of diffusion over time.

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