Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Anne Bradstreet ◽  
Religious Narrative ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Creative Vision

Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas (1544–90) is an essential figure for understanding the diversity and strength of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry. His works were read, translated, and imitated more widely than any other non-biblical literary work in early modern England and Scotland, leading Scottish and French literary culture to shape the development of English epic poetry and inspire new kinds of popular devotional verse. Thanks to James VI and I’s support, Du Bartas’ scriptural poems became emblems of international Protestantism that were cherished even more highly in England and Scotland than on the continent. His creative vision helped inexperienced devotional writers to find a voice as well as providing a model that Protestant poets (like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson) would resist, transform, and, ultimately, reject. This long-needed book examines Du Bartas’ legacy in England and Scotland, sensitive to the different cultural situations in which his works were read, discussed, and creatively imitated. The first part shows how James VI of Scotland played a decisive role in the Huguenot poet’s reception history, culminating in Josuah Sylvester’s translation Devine Weekes and Workes (1605). The second examines seventeenth-century divine epic, religious narrative, and popular devotional verse forms that reworked Du Bartas’ poetic structures to introduce meditative and figurative components that provided new possibilities for imaginative expression.

Prophecy

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-212
Author(s):  
Yaacob Dweck
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Rapid Spread

This chapter discusses Sabbatian messianism as an epistemological problem. How does one know whether or not someone is the Messiah? In the middle of the seventeenth century, prophecy was one way of obtaining such knowledge. Prophecy played a decisive role in the success of Sabbatianism. Adherents to the new movement emphasized the renewal of revelation both in the period of its rapid spread prior to Sabbetai Zevi's conversion as well as in the years that followed. Beginning with the leading Sabbatian propagandist, Nathan of Gaza, and continuing well into the eighteenth century, Sabbatians spoke and wrote about their activities as prophecy. Repeatedly they invoked their own capacity to communicate with the divine as a source for their own authority. Indeed, prophecy often served as the legitimating grounds for their suspension of legal norms and invention of new rituals. The chapter then looks at Jacob Sasportas's response to the Sabbatian renewal of prophecy as well as to other modes of knowing, such as dreams and astrology. For all of Sasportas's profound skepticism about the Sabbatian revival of prophecy, he refused to condemn the category outright. Just as he had continued to insist on his belief in the messianic idea but rejected Sabbetai Zevi as its fulfillment, he continued to hold open the possibility of prophecy while denying the legitimacy of Nathan of Gaza.

Al-Bīrūnī on Hermetic Forgery

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-66
Author(s):  
Kevin van Bladel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hermes Trismegistus

AbstractIn Central Asia in the early eleventh century, the Chorasmian scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī recognized that the Arabic works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were inventions of recent centuries falsely written in the name of the ancient sage of legend. He did, however, accept the existence of a historical Hermes and even attempted to establish his chronology. This article presents al-Bīrūnī’s statements about this and contextualizes his view of the Arabic Hermetica as he derived it from Arabic chronographic sources. Al-Bīrūnī’s argument is compared with the celebrated seventeenth-century European criticism of the Greek Hermetica by Isaac Casaubon. It documents a hitherto unknown but significant event in the reception history of the Hermetica and helps to illustrate al-Bīrūnī’s attitude toward the history of science.

Predestination and freedom in Milton's Paradise Lost

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-80
Author(s):  
Benjamin Myers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Fluid Sphere ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
History Of

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) offers a highly creative seventeenth-century reconstruction of the doctrine of predestination, a reconstruction which both anticipates modern theological developments and sheds important light on the history of predestinarian thought. Moving beyond the framework of post-Reformation controversies, the poem emphasises both the freedom and the universality of electing grace, and the eternally decisive role of human freedom in salvation. The poem erases the distinction between an eternal election of some human beings and an eternal rejection of others, portraying reprobation instead as the temporal self-condemnation of those who wilfully reject their own election and so exclude themselves from salvation. While election is grounded in the gracious will of God, reprobation is thus grounded in the fluid sphere of human decision. Highlighting this sphere of human decision, the poem depicts the freedom of human beings to actualise the future as itself the object of divine predestination. While presenting its own unique vision of predestination, Paradise Lost thus moves towards the influential and distinctively modern formulations of later thinkers like Schleiermacher and Barth.

Edmund Spenser: A Reception History

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Willy Maley ◽  
David Hill Radcliffe ◽  
James A. Riddell ◽  
Stanley Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Reception History

scholarly journals Nicholas Grimald, The Judas of the Reformation

PMLA ◽  
1922 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. R. Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
John Bale ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
Sir Thomas Wyatt ◽  
Poetic Drama ◽  
Verse Forms

Many a man of letters who has been accounted great in his own time and whose work has had no little influence on the world's literature has ceased to be a person of any interest in later years, and his works are no longer read. Few such men have left so little record of themselves, or have inspired in these latter days of research so little interest, so little desire to make inquiry into their lives and personalities as has Nicholas Grimald. Nevertheless, John Bale, the first writer of English literary history, tells how renowned he was in that day, and calls him the foremost alumnus of Cambridge and not the least glory of his time. Indeed, he might well be regarded as such. Next to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, he was the principal contributor to the first anthology of English poetry, then known as Songes and Sonnettes, now known as Tottel's Miscellany, a book which enjoyed astonishing popularity. A second edition of it appeared within a month of the first, and eight editions appeared within twenty years. His name is here joined to those of two men who are still remembered. Another reason for the interest of posterity is that two of Grimald's poems in this volume, “The Death of Zoroas,” and “Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Death,” were the first compositions in blank verse to be published in the English language. The credit, to be sure, is commonly given to Surrey for having written the first blank verse, for although the translation in that poetic form which he made of the second and the fourth book of the Aeneid was published June 21, 1557, a little over two weeks later than Songes and Sonnettes, it must have been written at least ten years before, as Surrey died in 1547. Nevertheless, it is not improbable that Grimald's compositions in blank verse were done even before Surrey's, for in 1547 he was appointed lecturer in rhetoric at Christ Church, Oxford. Warton suggests that Grimald's verses were “prolusions or illustrative practical specimens for our author's course of lectures in rhetoric.” But he had previously been engaged in literary work for some years. His poetic drama, Christus Redivivus, which was published in 1543, was written about 1539, when, as he says in its dedicatory epistle, he was about twenty. In 1548, he published his Archipropheta, which shows him to be a master of a variety of verse forms.

The Desperation of Deianira: Heroides 9 and Early Modern Translation

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Female Literacy

This essay charts the ways in which the story of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira was received in early modern Europe. In particular, it traces the reception history of the ninth of Ovid's Heroides, in which Deianira writes a letter of complaint, about her husband's sexual violence, and her disastrous attempt to reclaim his affections. Responses to Ovid's poem ranged from outrage – male poets angrily refuted Deianira's accusations – to vernacular translations that, in the hands of the Tudor writer George Turberville, sympathetically conveyed the anguish of the abused wife, but in the hands of Turberville's seventeenth-century successors, muted or silenced Deianira's complaints. The essay locates this reception history in the context of debates about domesticity, sexual (mis)conduct, and female literacy.

scholarly journals Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish: Civil War and Enemy Commiseration

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Yousef Deikna
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Human Life ◽  
British History ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Difficult Times

Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), prolific writers from the seventeenth century, came of age in one of the most difficult times in British history. Blair Worden, an eminent historian, writes, “The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history,” and none of the previous conflicts “has been so far-reaching, or has disrupted so many lives for so long, or has so imprinted itself on the nation’s memory” (2009, p. 1). Hutchinson and her husband, John, were on the side of the parliamentarians in the Civil War while Cavendish and her husband, William, were stout royalists. Instead of showing aggressive stances against their enemies, Hutchinson and Cavendish engaged expansively in a language of empathizing with the enemy in order to lessen the extreme partisanship of that period. Focusing specifically on Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, and Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, among other writings, I argue that during the political impasse which characterized the English Civil War writings, the perspectives advanced by Hutchinson and Cavendish highlight the valuation of human life regardless of political allegiance, augmenting the odds for peaceful co-existence, in which empathy is foregrounded over, and at times alongside, loss and agony as a result of the Civil War aftermath. Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking research in Empathy and The Novel draws upon examples from the Victorian period to illustrate her understanding of empathy, but she also states that “I feel sure they also pertain to the hopes of authors in earlier periods as well” (2007, p. 142), which is a position taken wholeheartedly in this article. Using a cognitive literary approach where authorial empathic constructions are analyzed, Hutchinson’s and Cavendish’s closely read texts portray an undeniable level of commiseration with the enemy with the goal of abating violence and increasing cooperation and understanding.

‘By the Compass of the Word’: The Life and Piety of William Kiffen — A Quatercentenary Appreciation

2017 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-379
Author(s):  
Michael A. G. Haykin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Particular Baptist ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
Charles Ii

William Kiffen, a central figure in the emergence of the British Particular Baptist community in the seventeenth century, came to congregationalist and baptistic convictions in the political and religious turmoil of the reign of Charles I. By the early 1640s he was a key leader among the Particular Baptists in London, and went on to play a central role in their establishment as a distinct community over the next six decades. He was personally acquainted with not only Oliver Cromwell, but also Charles II and James II. His major literary work was a defense of closed communion, in which he opposed the views of John Bunyan. Kiffen won this debate, and so determined the shape of Baptist polity in the following century.

Love's Wounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia N. Nazarian
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Francesco Petrarca ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Agrippa D'aubigne ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Relationship

This book takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, the book shows how Petrarch established a pattern of inequality between suffering poet and exalted Beloved rooted in political parrhēsia. Sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century French and English poets reshaped Petrarch's model into an idiom of extravagant brutality coded to their own historical circumstances. The book argues that these poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new “countersovereignty” from within the heart of vulnerability—a potentially revolutionary position through which to challenge cultural, religious, and political authority. Creating a secular equivalent to the martyr, early modern sonneteers crafted a voice that was both critical and unstoppable because it suffered. The book tracks the development of the counter-sovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Through interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, the text reads early modern sonnets as sites of contestation and collaboration and rewrites the relationship between early modern literary forms.

The Songs of the Dead: Poetry, Drama, and Ancient Death Rituals of Japan

1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshio Akima
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Death Rituals ◽  
Religious Idea ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Verse Forms

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.

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