scholarly journals “Verses of My Owne Making”: Literacy, Work, and Social Identity in Early Modern England

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-184
Author(s):  
Brodie Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Social Polarization ◽  
Cheap Print

Abstract Reading and writing became widespread in England over the course of the early modern period, with literacy expanding alongside rapid commercial development and growing economic inequality. This article shows how tradesmen and others of similar rank used reading and writing to create a powerful identity that cut across some of the sharpening divisions in wealth from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Growing numbers of economically precarious “middling” men and women took advantage of the spread of literacy to construct social roles for themselves based on godly work, vocational knowledge, and occupational fraternity. This analysis begins with the uniquely voluminous collection of notebooks filled by an Essex tradesman named Joseph Bufton (1651–1718). Drawing on his notebooks together with other examples of non-elite writing and cheap print, it reveals a broad literary culture that was emerging in provincial towns at this time. Through this, it connects the historiography of social structure and economic change to the growing research on non-elite literacy and life-writing. Taken together, these findings suggest that the existing narrative of early modern “social polarization” should be revisited. Rather than consistently reinforcing the deep economic divisions between workers and masters, literacy could often serve as a tool for crafting a shared identity that could encompass a whole trade.

Whoso List to Find?

2022 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Female Poets ◽  
Popular Ballads ◽  
Cheap Print

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

scholarly journals Early Modern European Languages and Literature: A Short Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
David Porter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Short Review ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Third ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Language And Literature

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.

Making Murder Public

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Formal Distinction

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.

The ‘Beame of Diuinity’: Animal suffering in the Early Thought of Robert Boyle

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm R. Oster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cruelty To Animals ◽  
Self Defence

It has long been recognized that unnecessary cruelty to animals was held to be morally wrong by many classical moralists and medieval scholastics, and was echoed repeatedly in the early-modern period, though not necessarily reflecting any particular concern for animals, but rather to indicate the supposed brutalizing effects on the human character. The prevalence of the more radical view that cruelty to animals was wrong regardless of human consequences has only been dealt with comparatively recently, in the pioneering work of Keith Thomas with regard to early-modern England. Thomas suggested that a remarkably constant and coherent argument underpinned the bulk of pamphleteering and preaching against animal cruelty in the period; man was entitled to domesticate animals and kill them for food and clothing but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. While wild animals could be killed for food or in self-defence, and game and vermin could be hunted, it was deemed wrong to kill only for pleasure. While this position could be found among Protestants of many different persuasions, the particular focus of successive campaigners changed over time. Preceding the Civil War the attack was concentrated on cock-fighting, bear-baiting and the ill-treatment of domestic animals; in the later seventeenth century it broadened out to include the caging of wild birds, brutal methods of slaughter, hare-hunting and vivisection.

scholarly journals Alligation Alternate and the Composition of Medicines: Arithmetic and Medicine in Early Modern England

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvan Bregman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Applications ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Practical Mathematics ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Mathematical Literature

Practical mathematics in the early modern period was applied to such fields as astronomy and navigation; cartography and surveying; engineering and military arts, including gunnery; and especially banking and mercantile trade. Those who have written about practical mathematics make no mention of medical applications in their surveys, although there were many cases where physicians set up as mathematical practitioners. This article examines medical applications found in practical mathematical literature up to the end of the seventeenth century in England.

Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Period

This chapter examines the traces of Petrarchism in England during the early modern period. It discusses Roger Ascham's attack on Petrarch, Elizabeth Tudor's translation of the first ninety lines of Petrarch's Trionfo dell'Eternità, and Arundel Harrington's rewriting of the Vita Solitaria. It suggests that it was Petrarch's versatility and elusiveness that allowed so many different versions of him to circulate in the early modern period.

The Garden of Anguish: Gethsemane in Early Modern England

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH COVINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Divided Self ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
Spiritual Self ◽  
Self Examination

Few biblical episodes have generated more theological interpretation across the centuries than that of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he appears fearfully to resist the divine will in the moments before the passion sequence is initiated. Scholars of the early modern period, however, have tended not to notice how central the scene became in the wake of Protestant and Catholic reformation developments, renewed calls for spiritual self-examination and the resurgent phenomenon of martyrdom. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that, in the case of England, Jesus in Gethsemane not only held acute resonances across different confessions, but resulted in interpretations that perpetuated a new kind of subjectivity, and one that influenced modernity and its notions of the divided self in a state of faith and doubt.

Gemeinsamer Alltag – geteilter Lebensraum? Der Frankfurter Wochenmarkt als christlich-jüdischer Begegnungsort

Aschkenas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena Kasper-Marienberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Frankfurt Am Main ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cattle Markets ◽  
Christian Men

AbstractWeekly markets and cattle markets, as well as local and international fairs, were important places of encounter for Jews and Christians in the early modern period. Weekly grocery markets in particular have drawn only little attention in terms of being »Jewish spaces«, but Jewish men and women were an integral part of them just like Christian men and women were. As both customers and vendors, Jews shaped the customs, times, supply and kinds of offered groceries at these markets. The weekly grocery market of Frankfurt am Main can serve as an example for examining the social interactions as well as the spatial dynamics that could develop in such a closely regulated, hierarchically structured and religiously shaped market space.

Tradition and Exclusion: Parochial Officeholding in Early Modern England, A Case Study from North Norfolk, 1580–1640

Rural History ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAN PITMAN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Shared Understandings ◽  
The Way

This article suggests that there has been a tendency to understate the degree to which officeholding during the early modern period was embedded within the community, moulded by local influences and fulfilling a range of different functions in the parish. An over-emphasis upon national processes of social and cultural change has resulted in a failure to appreciate the complexity of the politics of officeholding. There has been only limited recognition of both the presence of constraints upon the actions of parochial elites and the mechanisms through which particular groups established and maintained control over parochial institutions. A detailed analysis of officeholding within seven parishes lying on the north Norfolk coast stresses the extent to which ‘parochial traditions’ determined the way in which things were done. It is argued that the effective linkage of officeholding to these shared understandings and to ideals of participation and inclusion created a powerful rhetoric through which the exclusion of a large minority of the populace and uneven distributions of officeholding were justified.

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