English Mythography in its European Context, 1500-1650

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
European Context ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
European Renaissance

Greco-Roman mythology and its reception are at the heart of the European Renaissance, and mythographies—texts that collected and explained ancient myths—were considered indispensable companions to any reader of literature. Despite the importance of this genre, English mythographies have not gained sustained critical attention, because they have been wrongly considered mere copies of their European counterparts. This monograph studies the English mythographies written between 1577 and 1647 by Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Francis Bacon, Henry Reynolds, and Alexander Ross. By placing their texts into a wider, European context, it reveals the unique English take on the genre. The book unfolds the role myth played in the wider English Renaissance culture (religious conflicts, literary life, natural philosophy, poetics, and Civil War politics) and shows, for the first time, the considerable explanatory value it holds for the study of English Renaissance literature. Finally, this book is a contribution to the history of myth philosophy. It reveals how early modern England answered a question we still find fascinating today: what is myth?

Book reviews: Ministry of science?

1993 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-311
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Public Institution ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Truth ◽  
British State ◽  
Lord Chancellor

Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy . Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 236, £35 (hdbk). ISBN 0-521-382491 ‘Bacon’s perspective was always that of a statesman; he believed problems of knowledge were properly part of a statesman’s concerns; and he believed a reformed natural philosophy would be a splendid support for the imperial [British] state he desired to see established.’ So Julian Martin opens the final chapter, ‘A reformed natural philosophy’, of a book that has already traversed Bacon’s worlds of Elizabethan statesmanship and law. Francis Bacon has a firm place in the history of philosophy and science, and is otherwise almost unknown save by his disgraceful fall from office. Julian Martin insists that his writings should be set in the context of statecraft rather than epistemology; above all he was no logician. If Bacon wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor it was because his aim was to be a Solon (or Salomon) rather than an Aristotle, despite the title of his most-quoted scientific book. Bacon did not write to teach private men how to make discoveries in Nature, for he was guided by an entrenched detestation of individualism. He sought support for the establishment of a public institution, a ‘new department of state, a “royal work” with a royal governor’ - presumably Bacon himself (p. 163). It is hardly strange that his idea of the way to arrive at scientific truth was an adaptation from his ideal process ‘for acquiring knowledge about the law’ (p. 169). Hence the justice of Harvey ’ s apothegm.

Francis Bacon and the Aristotelian Tradition on the Nature of Sound

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
Claudia Dumitru ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Local Motion ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

Centuries II and III of Francis Bacon’s posthumous natural history Sylva Sylvarum are largely dedicated to sound. This paper claims that Bacon’s investigation on this topic is fruitfully read against the background of the Aristotelian theory of sound, as presented in De anima commentaries. I argue that Bacon agreed with the general lines of this tradition in a crucial aspect: he rejected the reduction of sound to local motion. Many of the experimental instances and more theoretical remarks from his natural history of sound can be elucidated against this wider concern of distinguishing sound from motion, a theme that had been a staple of Aristotelian discussions of sound and hearing since the Middle Ages. Bacon admits that local motion is part of the efficient cause of sound, but he denies that it is its form, which means that sound cannot be reduced to a type of local motion. This position places him outside subsequent developments in natural philosophy in the seventeenth century.

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tokien as I knew them (never well)

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Eric Stanley
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Sir Gawain ◽  
Ancrene Wisse ◽  
General Editor ◽  
Katherine Group ◽  
History Of

I attended all the lectures C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien gave in 1948 to 1951. My own teaching of English Renaissance literature at Birmingham University was informed by Lewis’s volume in the Oxford History of English Literature (1954), parts of which I had heard him give as lectures. At Birmingham we started a series of Medieval and Renaissance texts, and I wrote to Lewis and ask him if he would be our General Editor; he said, yes. He asked me to meet him, correspondence followed, and I quote from a long, witty, and wise letter about an edition of mine, and about another edition which Lewis disliked and I also quote from that sharper letter. I knew Tolkien because, as an undergraduate I attended his weekly seminars. At that time he himself was greatly interested in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group. He lectured on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Much later, in 1972, I met Tolkien again, at a book-launch party. I ventured to speak to him. I gave my name, and in his charming way he said he remembered me. I wondered at that, but took it as evidence of his kindness.

Nuns

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wallace
Keyword(s):  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

In his poemUpon Appleton House, Andrew Marvell implies that the Appleton nunnery in Yorkshire, along with all its works, vanish “in one instant.” The suggestion that the English nuns disappear the moment they are chased from their buildings is iconic both of English Renaissance imaginings and of modern scholarship. The mysterious absence of nuns was compounded with their excessive presence, a paradox that in many ways compares with medieval Catholic thinking and feeling about nuns. This article examines the representations of nuns in English Renaissance literature and their habitual failure to portray the kinds of lives, and conditions of enclosure, actually known to nuns in England. It also considers how the long history of convent literacies in England, leading from Anglo-Saxon and Latin to Anglo-Norman and English, results in gradual separation of women from the literacy of the clerical elite. The article analyzes Caesarius of Heisterbach’sDialogus Miracolorum, a compilation of miniature ascetic romances written for Cistercian novice monks.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Ancient Revolutions in the Literature of Polish Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226
Author(s):  
Maciej Junkiert
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
European Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
Literary Reception

This article aims to examine the Polish literary reception of the French Revolution during the period of Romanticism. Its main focus is on how Polish writers displaced their more immediate experiences of revolutionary events onto a backdrop of ‘ancient revolutions’, in which revolution was described indirectly by drawing on classical traditions, particularly the history of ancient Greeks and Romans. As this classical tradition was mediated by key works of German and French thinkers, this European context is crucial for understanding the literary strategies adopted by Polish authors. Three main approaches are visible in the Polish reception, and I will illustrate them using the works of Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). My comparative study will be restricted to four works: Krasiński's Irydion and Przedświt (Predawn), Słowacki's Agezylausz (Agesilaus) and Norwid's Quidam.

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