Meditations

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-177
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Francis Quarles

Several seventeenth-century poets explored ways to compose verse meditations that showed readers how to use scriptural poems like Devine Weekes as a devotional aid. Joseph Hall and Francis Quarles advocated new forms of non-lyric meditation, a literary mode especially practised by women writers. As such poems offered a greater role to the self as an interpretive agent, scriptural poets like Anne Southwell and Edward Browne stretched Du Bartas’ models in ways that responded to their personal, political, and social circumstances. Even though historical and meditative verse forms blended into each other, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse distinguishes sharply between the two modes in order to cast her as a conservative historical poet writing under Du Bartas’ shadow.

Happiness and the Theology of the Self in Late Seventeenth-Century England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Muldrew
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
Appropriate Use

Muldrew traces the integration of Aristotelian into Christian thinking about happiness, by Thomas Aquinas and during the Renaissance but more particularly in the thinking of late seventeenth-century ‘Latitudinarian’ divines. He argues that they were seeking an alternative way to achieve peace and tranquillity to that offered by Hobbes, who had stressed the need for strong authority. Their alternative drew on a variety of classical ideas about self-cultivation and self-discipline, but built upon and further developed relatively hedonistic versions of these. The pursuit of moderate sensual gratification was legitimized as an appropriate use of human faculties implanted by God. Although this was an erudite tradition, it was presented to a less erudite audience in sermons: these writers often transposed ideas from a classical to an English-language setting. In that context, the word ‘happiness’ came to loom large, appearing frequently and functioning as a key motif in latitudinarian thought.

Institutions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn ◽  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Irina Reyfman ◽  
Stephanie Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
The Self ◽  
Friendship Networks ◽  
The Creation

The chapter examines the emergence of literature from coteries and domestic routine. It describes how male poetic circles, held together by friendship and common intellectual interests, produced the interconnected institutions of literature necessary to literature. While early in the century, women writers mostly worked privately, they eventually moved into more public venues such as the salon. An interest in subjectivity, the self, and friendship networks, which were also reading communities, fostered the creation of a performative and reflective self that gave rise to literary heroes to satisfy the new interests and demands of writers and readers.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Human Sacrifice

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West African ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
The West ◽  
Southeastern Nigeria ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This chapter recounts the broader Akan world's or Asante's human sacrifice. It notes that the practice, as established by Law, was widespread in those parts of the West African coastal and forest zones largely untouched by Islam, both in powerful states such Benin, Dahomey and Asante and among non-centralized peoples such as the Igbo in present-day southeastern Nigeria. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that human sacrifice may well have increased in magnitude in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, as increasing levels of militarization and accumulation generated new forms of violence, predation and consumption. The earliest evidence for human sacrifice in the region, however, came from the Gold Coast itself, where, as elsewhere in West Africa, it was identified as an integral part of mortuary customs for the wealthy and powerful. The chapter then shows seventeenth-century accounts about the slaves who composed the majority of those immolated at royal funerals. It also explores how the self-sacrifice of certain individuals served on the early Akan states.

Epilogue: Resurrection and Zombies

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-190
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Tv Shows

This chapter examines the current pop culture fascination with the undead body visible in the explosion of TV shows and films about zombies. Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom tells the story of the well-known French writer’s brief but intense conversion to Christianity, in the grip of which he was involved in developing the French TV series Les Revenants, which was the model for A&E’s The Returned. Carrère’s account of his relationship to the Christian theology of resurrection as an inspiration for Les Revenants reveals the truth of the “undead” genres more generally, namely as a culture-wide return of the repressed, a protest against the increasingly disembodied, virtualized way we live today. Implicitly, the undead character (including the zombie) attacks the modern fantasy that the self is, in its essence, disembodied and therefore reducible to information, data, and code and in which people yearn for a cybernetic resurrection that will take the form of entering into the disembodied life of the digital world. In the midst of this disembodied virtualized world, pop zombie culture, like seventeenth-century culture, is a reminder of the body’s abiding vulnerabilities, limitations, and also potentials for transcendence.

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