The Lost Works of Thomas Becon

The Library ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-497
Author(s):  
Jonathan Reimer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Literary Output

Abstract This article attributes four lost works to the literary corpus of the English clergyman and bestselling Tudor devotional author Thomas Becon (1512–1567): The Shelde of Saluacion, An Heauenly Acte, Christen Prayers and Godly Meditacions, and The Resurreccion of the Masse. It ascribes these texts to Becon in light of three types of corroborating evidence: contemporary attribution, parallels of content, and early publication history. These four lost works not only furnish a fuller picture of his literary output, but also provide new insights into his career, rhetoric, and theology. As Becon was the most popular evangelical devotional author writing in English during the sixteenth century, this analysis of his hitherto unattributed books makes a valuable contribution to the bibliography of Tudor England, especially during the transformative years of the Henrician, Edwardine, Marian, and Elizabethan Reformations.

Flat Style: Things Fall Apart and Its Illustrations

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Things Fall Apart

In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

A Venetian Secretary in England: an unpublished diplomatic report in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice1

1997 ◽  
Vol 70 (172) ◽  
pp. 170-181
Author(s):  
Robert Barrington
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Political Analysis

Abstract Venetian diplomatic relazioni are a familiar source to sixteenth‐century historians. They often present a detailed philosophical and political analysis of the courts to which Venice had sent ambassadors. At their best, they are sophisticated humanist commentaries on the state. Relazioni from Tudor England were no exception. Unfortunately, the politically turbulent years of the early Reformation are marked by a break in the Venetian relazioni coinciding with the period when diplomatic representation was suspended. However, a newly‐discovered document reproduced here, from the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, is almost certainly a secretary's report which fills this chronological gap. The document is formal in tone and follows the structure of a model relazione. The lengthy descriptions of England's history and geography and references to contemporary events suggest a date of c. 1540.

The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 59-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Trench Warfare

Something of the atmosphere of trench warfare, with its immobility and its desperation, has overcome the historiography of early Tudor politics. The most spectacular impasse concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn. Three scholars have recently set out and defended against one another divergent explanations of her fall. Professor Ives and Professor Warnicke can agree that Dr Bernard is wrong: Anne cannot possibly have been destroyed by a masterful and jealous king who may reasonably have believed her guilty of multiple adultery as charged. Dr Bernard and Professor Ives can agree that Professor Warnicke is wrong: Anne's fall cannot be attributed to her miscarriage of a deformed foetus, awakening the king's fears of witchcraft and its sixteenth-century stablemates, sodomy and incest. Professor Warnicke and Dr Bernard can agree that Professor Ives is wrong: Anne cannot have been ousted by a factional plot at court, coordinated by Thomas Cromwell and cynically using fabricated charges of adultery to hustle the king into destroying the queen and her partisans at a single blow.

scholarly journals ‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Kirtio
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Sumptuary Legislation

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of sumptuary legislation in sixteenth century England. It argues that the aims of sumptuary legislation were threefold: that legislators sought to maintain the stability of the common weal through social regulation, moral regulation through the moralization of luxury goods, and to regulate England’s economy, by prohibiting foreign trade in luxury goods, in order to stimulate the home economy and the burgeoning wool and stocking trade.

The making of Tudor England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Self Help

The new men’s role in Henry VII’s regime must be set amid the contribution made to his reign by other royal councillors and servants, bishops, lesser clerics, peers, and courtiers. Yet their efforts did much to give his government its distinctive flavour. Their careers as upwardly mobile agents of royal power were not unprecedented, but were notable in their impact, paralleled those of their contemporaries in other European polities, and foreshadowed those of later sixteenth-century statesmen. Their importance was evident to those interpreting Henry’s reign in the decades that followed, into the generations of Holinshed and Stow, Shakespeare, and Bacon. Critical contemporaries were right that they mixed self-help liberally with public service, but they were central to the making of Tudor England.

scholarly journals Erasmus and the Politics of Translation in Tudor England

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Lucy Wooding
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Significant Figure ◽  
Original Intention

Desiderius Erasmus was a significant figure in early sixteenth-century England, and many of his works were translated into English during the reign of Henry VIII. In the process of translation the original intention of these works was subverted as Erasmus's reputation was appropriated by his translators and their patrons for their own purposes. His works were recast in English form to serve a variety of different agendas, from those of Henrician conservatives to Protestants pushing for more radical religious reform. This article looks at some of these translations, showing how they illustrate the variations in religious attitudes during these volatile years and the competing claims for validation. In particular, Erasmus's pronouncements on the importance of Scripture translation were annexed and deployed in the debate over the English Bible, demonstrating how his views about translation were in themselves translated to reflect the political and religious needs of the English situation.

WRITING ABOUT VIOLENCE IN THE TUDOR KINGDOMS

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 829-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. RAPPLE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Vantage Points

ABSTRACTDespite differing historiographical traditions, the histories of Tudor England and Ireland often face similar problems, not least how best to narrate and analyse episodes of state and non-state violence in a satisfying way. Latterly, sophisticated models for dealing with this have emerged in treatments of English popular politics. These works succeed in eschewing both inherited ideas of English exceptionalism and the ‘enclosure’ of social history. They also offer a compelling and holistic view of social and political interactions in the past from a number of vantage points. Many recent treatments of sixteenth-century Irish history, by contrast, have centred on atrocity and even genocide. This narrower focus does not preclude important scholarship, but its thematic and methodological limitations hamper that scholarship's broader non-polemical value. The appreciation of Tudor Ireland's status as a political society and the close scrutiny of that political society and its actors is a necessity. It offers just as promising an embarkation point for sophisticated and interesting studies as the study of Tudor English popular politics.

So Much at Stake: Martyrs and Martyrdom in Early Modern England The trail of martyrdom. Persecution and resistance in sixteenth-century England. By Sarah Covington. Pp. xii+289. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. $55 (cloth), $28 (paper). 0 268 04225 X; 0 268 04226 8 Making women martyrs in Tudor England. By Megan L. Hickerson. Pp. ix+239 incl. 2 figs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. £50. 1 4039 3833 4 Martyrdom and literature in early modern England. By Susannah Brietz Monta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. viii+236. £55. 0 521 84498 3

2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-541
Author(s):  
THOMAS FREEMAN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Third ◽  
Women Martyrs ◽  
University Of Notre Dame

In recent years, a number of works devoted solely or partly to martyrdom in early modern England – most notably Brad Gregory's seminal Salvation at stake and Anne Dillon's The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community – have helped to bring the study of this topic from the margins of scholarship into the academic mainstream. Two of the three works discussed here further develop this recent research by analysing representations of martyrdom in English martyrologies; the third work, Sarah Covington's survey on religious persecution in early modern England, is gravely impaired by its almost complete disregard of the complexities present in the narrative sources on martyrs and their persecutors.

The Anglo-Gallicanism of dom Thomas Preston, 1567–1647

1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 239-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurus Lunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
The Church

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

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