Reading Early Modern literature through OED3

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-39
Author(s):  
Giles Goodland

We may think we know what a neologism is, but it is hard to isolate the nature of the moment in which neologizing occurs. In literature sometimes this moment is enacted for effects that may not belong to the discourses of normal communication, and these effects are compounded when it is a loan-neologism. The Early Modern period was one of increasing contact between the languages of Europe, and literature responded to this in a variety of ways. This paper looks at neologistic borrowings into English literature, using a selection of canonical authors as refracted through the Oxford English Dictionary, to see if they can tell us something about the porousness of literary language in this period. Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary; Shakespeare; Jonson; Dryden; Skelton; loan word; neologism

Author(s):  
Roze Hentschell

St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices is a study of London’s cathedral, its immediate surroundings, and its everyday users in early modern literary and historical documents and images, with a special emphasis on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hentschell discusses representations of several of the seemingly discrete spaces of the precinct to reveal how these spaces overlap with and inform one another spatially. She argues that specific locations—including the Paul’s nave (also known as Paul’s Walk), Paul’s Cross pulpit, the bookshops of Paul’s Churchyard, the College of the Minor Canons, Paul’s School, the performance space for the Children of Paul’s, and the fabric of the cathedral itself—should be seen as mutually constitutive and in a dynamic, ever-evolving state. To support this argument, she attends closely to the varied uses of the precinct, including the embodied spatial practices of early modern Londoners and visitors, who moved through the precinct, paused to visit its sacred and secular spaces, and/or resided there. This includes the walkers in the nave, sermon-goers, those who shopped for books, the residents of the precinct, the choristers—who were also schoolboys and actors—and those who were devoted to church repairs and renovations. By attending to the interactions between place and people and to the multiple stories these interactions tell—Hentschell attempts to animate St Paul’s and deepen our understanding of the cathedral and precinct in the early modern period.


Author(s):  
Namrata Chaturvedi ◽  

This paper is a close study of early modern women’s poetry on childbirth and the imminent circumstances of maternal and foetal/infantile mortality in seventeenth century England. In tracing the development of women’s post-partum mental health from the medieval to the early modern period, this paper argues for a serious investment in literature composed as memoirs, poetry, diaries and funeral sermons as a means of understanding the trajectories and lacunae in women’s mental health in the early modern period. This study also argues for including the religious experience into any consideration of women’s post-partum health and therapeutic interventions. Lastly, it shows how affect studies have proved the recuperative potential in literature of consolation and mourning so that women’s writing begins to get recognized for its interventionist potential rather than a fossilized historical treatment as it has often received.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
David Porter

This article engages with several recent books about language and literature, with a general focus on the early modern period in Europe. One of these books discusses language study in early modern England. Another examines the histories of words relating to ‘ingenuity’. The third provides a theoretical look at the aphorism with a wide historical scope but with some chapters relating to early modern literature. Each is of general interest for linguistic and literary scholars.


Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Lovett

The states of sixteenth-century Europe fell into two financial groups. France and Spain, in a class of their own, enjoyed an apparently total freedom for much of the time from the normal constraints, and this in spite of their rapidly escalating debts. The other European states which made up the second category were compelled to observe far more stringent controls. The distinction between the two groups was further underlined by the question of credit. Although the Habsburg and Valois monarchs spent in a way that was both financially reckless and socially unpitying, the moneyed classes were only too eager to advance additional funds. Repeated, and sometimes spectacular, failures seemed rarely to have damped their enthusiasm. The smaller states seldom found such ease of access to credit. For most of the time they were obliged to maintain a semblance of order by sustained and sordid frugality - the bilking of minor creditors, the levying of dubious ‘loans’, or the dissipation of capital. While no strangers to these devices, France and Spain were able to operate for prolonged periods free from ordinary limitations. But even for these privileged beings the moment of truth eventually arrived. Resources were finite; and even an imperial state could exhaust the credit, if not the credulity, of its principal bankers. Such an intrusion of reality took the form of a public bankruptcy.


Author(s):  
Victoria Moul

This chapter discusses Latin poetry of the period 1500–1700, with a particular focus on the British Latin verse of this period, as well as authors from elsewhere who had an international reputation. Since the Latin literature of the Renaissance is conventionally considered to begin in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century with Petrarch, and the Italian Latin literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was strongly influential on the rest of Europe throughout the early modern period, this chapter also gives some account of key figures from that earlier period. The chapter discusses the various contexts for Latin verse composition in the period, the most significant forms and genres (including lyric, elegy, epigram, and epyllion), key British Latin authors (including Campion, Herbert, Milton, and Cowley), the relationship to English literature, modes of publication and the directions of future research.


Author(s):  
Mary-Ann Constantine ◽  
Éva Guillorel

This section comprises a selection of thirty-five Breton ballads, presented in the original Breton with English translations. Each ballad text is followed by a short analysis giving, where possible, information on its provenance and exploring the literary and historical context of the events it describes. Reference is also made to other versions and occasionally to international parallels. The material covers a wide range of topics, from shipwrecks and murders to penitential journeys, the plague, scenes from war and encounters in love. It draws on themes from the European medieval literary tradition, the literature of other Celtic-speaking countries, and events from Breton history, particularly from the turbulent early modern period.


Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo

The conclusion draws together the main themes and concerns of the book: namely how the translation and application of Livy in Tudor England was intricately connected to the most pressing political and cultural concerns of the day. So too it reflects on Livy’s impact on the vernacular literatures of the period, including William Painter’s novellas and Shakespeare’s poetry and prose. It also underlines the fact that, rather than a diminishing interest in Livy, the seventeenth century saw the historian at the heart of the constitutional debates underpinning the English Civil War. The translation of Livy in the early-modern period, as the conclusion underlines, functioned not only as a reflection of the political concerns of the moment, but also as an active attempt to reshape, refashion, and urge forward those concerns. Though Livy’s part in the Classical Reception of the early-modern era is sometimes underplayed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Livy’s contribution to the culture and politics of sixteenth-, and indeed seventeenth-, century England.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28
Author(s):  
Suryyia Manzoor ◽  
Taniya Iqbal

Abstract This article reviews water transportation, testing and purification techniques in a regional context - the Indo-Pak subcontinent, a southern region of Asia - during the early modern period. A brief history of comparative methodologies based on surveys and historical texts has been explored as evidence of the evolving types of water testing parameters between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This analysis also took under consideration the role of culture, beliefs as well as religious rituals in the selection of drinking water and how it has influenced the population living conditions, dominating the process of decision-making within a specific community.


Author(s):  
Rachel Willie

Transnational exchange and intellectual networks in the early modern period relied upon translation—mainly into Latin—as a way to communicate across Europe. Translation was integral to humanist education where creative engagement with the source text was admired. Yet the exegetical and socio-political considerations that underpinned biblical translation meant that the rights and wrongs of translating the Bible into the vernacular in England was hotly debated. Whereas scriptural translation drew attention to the need to translate word for word to prevent heresy and to maintain accuracy in the presentation of the Word, psalm translation and translating from other vernacular languages posed different challenges for the translator; these challenges perhaps become most apparent when translating across confessional divides. This chapter considers the relationship between translation and religion in early modern English literature and the wider European perspectives that informed the ways in which narrative was recreated in English imaginative writing.


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