How to Respond to New Atheists: Learning How to View the Material World, Knowledge, and Mystery from Seventeenth-Century Poet Lucy Hutchinson

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Christina Iluzada
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Material World ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson

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.

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.

Digby, Kenelm (1603–65)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christia Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Vegetative Growth ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Material World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Exhaustive Study ◽  
Mechanical Physics

Seventeenth-century English Catholic, original member of the Royal Society, and one of the first philosophers to produce a fully developed system of mechanical philosophy, Sir Kenelm Digby cut a dashing figure as a poet, privateer and philosopher. As a Catholic and royalist, he spent much of his life in semi-exile on the continent where he conversed with many of the political and intellectual leaders of his time; as a philosopher, he was favourably compared to René Descartes and John Locke. He attempted to wed the philosophy of Aristotle to the new mechanical physics, which maintained that every event in the material world is reducible to matter in motion. His interests and writings cover a wide range, from religion and magic to vegetative growth and literary commentary. The explicit goal of his most significant book, Two Treatises (1644), was to prove the immortality of the human soul. To this end, the first treatise constitutes an exhaustive study of bodies and their features. By showing that all corporeal qualities are to be explained in strictly material terms, he prepares the way for a thorough discussion of the soul. Digby argues that the soul must be immaterial (and hence immortal) because otherwise its features cannot be explained. He went on to apply the mechanical principles which he developed in this work to a variety of topics, including some traditionally associated with the occult. His works on alchemical, medical and religious topics were also widely read.

The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Individual Study ◽  
Material World ◽  
Autos Sacramentales ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Sor Juana

This study analyses the autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95). It focusses on their relationship to the changing currents of philosophical thought in the late-seventeenth century Hispanic world, from a mindset characterized by scepticism, Neostoicism, and suspicion of the material world as a source of truth, to an empirical approach to the natural world that understood the information received by the senses as a fallible, yet useful, provisional source of knowledge. By examining each play in turn, along with the introductory loa with which they were intended to be performed, the study explores how each drama seeks to integrate empirical ideas with a Catholic understanding of transubstantiation. At the same time, each individual study identifies new sources for these plays, and demonstrates how these illuminate, or nuance, present readings of the works. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana’s engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasize the importance of both the material and the transcendent in understanding the sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence of the Christianized stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used this work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

Theory and reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronny Spaans
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Material World ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Important Shift

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic dominated global trade. Historical research has stressed the positive effects of exchanges of goods and knowledge. In literary criticism, the merchant-poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695) is similarly presented as a poet with an interest in the material world. But Six’s work includes a number of poems on exotic materials that not yet have been examined. These texts show that global trade, to a greater extent than previously understood, gave rise to a certain moral anxiety. I argue that Six’s approach to exotics drugs is therefore determined by a process of self-criticism, but that it also contributed to an important shift in early modern science, from drug lore based on mythical concepts, to botany based on experience and observation.

scholarly journals Physica in John Locke's Adversaria and Classifications of the Branches of Knowledge

Locke Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 69-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Di Biase
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Material World ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
The One ◽  
Theoretical Science

The framework of the various schemes of Physica in Locke’s classifications of knowledge (ca. 1670-1687) shows relevant traces of what may be defined, in a very broad sense, as an Aristotelian model: the internal divisions of this science are shaped into the classical ordering of the Stagirite’s physical works, as was common in seventeenth-century Aristotelian texts on natural philosophy. However, Locke’s schemes are also evidence of his uneasiness with that model, especially with reference to the first part—the one containing the fundamentals of physics, or physica generalis—and the last, concerning the objects of sense— one of the branches of physica specialis. This uneasiness was clearly due to Locke’s adherence to mechanism (in particular to Boyle’s mechanism) as well as to his empiricism. The last scheme of Physica (ca. 1687) shows Locke’s detachment from the Aristotelian model and his adhesion to Pansophism: the object of physica generalis, which in the earlier schemes was circumscribed to the material world, is re-conceptualised in broader terms which include spiritual beings. This later scheme is also evidence of a redefinition of Physica as a theoretical science, a point which was somewhat obscured in Locke’s previous schemes by the location of the discipline after the practical sciences. The various adversaria Locke wrote in 1677 help to illuminate his way of conceiving the object and scope of Physica; they show the relevance he attributed to the Baconian method of natural history, as well as the priority he assigned to useful knowledge with respect to speculative knowledge.

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