Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter Writing Manuals

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Webster Newbold
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Book Reading ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Vernacular Rhetoric ◽  
The Core ◽  
Vernacular Literacy ◽  
Early English

Abstract Two noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), and Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586). Both works reflected and sought to influence literacy habits in the book-reading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three aspects are likely to have stirred reader interest: a connection for vernacular learners with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige education; a focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance; and a large collection of model letters, in which readers would have found exemplary discourse coupled with proto-fictional and amatory elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

scholarly journals Scaling Uncertainty in Visual Perception and Estimation Tasks

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Brower Schille-Hudson ◽  
David Landy
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Uncertain Information ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Estimation Task ◽  
The Core ◽  
Bayesian Formulation ◽  
Visual Properties ◽  
The Bayesian Approach ◽  
Regular Patterns

Demographic perception—the perception of social quantities of geopolitical scale and social significance—has been extensivelystudied in cognitive and political science (Citrin & Sides, 2008; Gilens, 2001; Herda, 2013). Regular patterns of over- and under-estimation emerge. Americans greatly overestimate, for instance, the proportion of citizens that identify as gay or Muslim, while underestimating those that are Christian. While these errors have been attributed to social factors such as fear of specific minorities (Gallagher, 2003; Wong, 2007), other work has suggested that these patterns result from the psychophysics of the perception of proportions (Landy, Guay & Marghetis 2018). A Bayesian formulation suggests that biases in the estimation of both social proportions and simple visual properties result from a common source: ‘hedging’ uncertain information toward a prior. Here we present a novel lab paradigm and two experiments that manipulate uncertainty in a simple (dot estimation) task, verifying the core assumptions of the Bayesian approach.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Early English ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis ◽  
The Middle Ages

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

scholarly journals A unified view of density-based methods for semi-supervised clustering and classification

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1894-1952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jadson Castro Gertrudes ◽  
Arthur Zimek ◽  
Jörg Sander ◽  
Ricardo J. G. B. Campello
Keyword(s):  
Supervised Classification ◽  
Clustering Algorithms ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Supervised Clustering ◽  
The Core ◽  
Density Based Clustering ◽  
Clustering And Classification ◽  
Unified View ◽  
New Framework

Abstract Semi-supervised learning is drawing increasing attention in the era of big data, as the gap between the abundance of cheap, automatically collected unlabeled data and the scarcity of labeled data that are laborious and expensive to obtain is dramatically increasing. In this paper, we first introduce a unified view of density-based clustering algorithms. We then build upon this view and bridge the areas of semi-supervised clustering and classification under a common umbrella of density-based techniques. We show that there are close relations between density-based clustering algorithms and the graph-based approach for transductive classification. These relations are then used as a basis for a new framework for semi-supervised classification based on building-blocks from density-based clustering. This framework is not only efficient and effective, but it is also statistically sound. In addition, we generalize the core algorithm in our framework, HDBSCAN*, so that it can also perform semi-supervised clustering by directly taking advantage of any fraction of labeled data that may be available. Experimental results on a large collection of datasets show the advantages of the proposed approach both for semi-supervised classification as well as for semi-supervised clustering.

Religious Patronage as Gendered Family Memory in Sixteenth-century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29
Author(s):  
Stephanie Thomson ◽  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Early English ◽  
A Site ◽  
Large Corpus

Through an analysis of a large corpus of sixteenth-century wills and testaments, this article explores Englishwomen’s end-of-life religious patronage a site for the production of family identity and memory, and as a mechanism by which family and faith were woven together. It considers both the influence of the family on women’s post-mortem piety, and their role as executrices for their husbands. In doing so, it argues that women were integral to producing the commemorative practices that ensured their families’ immortality, and that these practices were in turn an important means by which religious practice and belief were renegotiated and refigured during the early English Reformation.

Complexity in national legislation of the Early Modern English period

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anu Lehto
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Genre Studies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Systematic Method ◽  
National Legislation ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Early English

This paper concentrates on Early Modern English statutes printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study considers the development of complexity and the rise of modern writing conventions by following the diachronic pragmatic view. The analysis also draws on genre studies and underlines the sociohistorical impact on linguistic changes. Complexity is assessed by a systematic method that observes the textual structure and syntax. The material consists of legislative documents in Early English Books Online; six of the documents were transcribed and compiled into a small-scale corpus. The results indicate that complexity was a common feature in the Early Modern English period: coordination and subordination are frequently used, and the sixteenth-century documents have an increasing tendency to favour subordination. During the sixteenth century, legislative sentences and text type structure become more regular and correspond to present-day practices.

The compilation and ownership of the ‘St Emmeram’ codex (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274)

1982 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 161-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Rumbold
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Southern Germany ◽  
The Core ◽  
Polyphonic Music

The manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274 (now also ‘Tresorhandschrift l’) is a large collection of mensural polyphonic music, mostly composed in the first half of the fifteenth century, although a few pieces date back to the late fourteenth. Apart from its importance as a musical source (more than half the compositions it contains are unknown from other sources), Clm 14274 is the geographically northernmost representative of the small group of manuscripts from northern Italy and southern Germany which contain the core of the surviving repertory of early-fifteenth-century polyphony, and, as such, provides potentially vital documentary material for the study of this repertory.

Reading Cosmographia: Peter Apian’s Book-Instrument Hybrid and the Rise of the Mathematical Amateur in the Sixteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 277-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Gaida
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Mathematical Culture ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Impact

The incorporation of paper instruments, also known as volvelles, into astronomical and cosmographical texts is a well-known facet of sixteenth-century printing. However, the impact that these instruments had on the reading public has yet to be determined. This paper argues that the inclusion of paper instruments in Peter Apian’s Cosmographia transforms the text into a book-instrument hybrid. The instruments and accompanying text in Cosmographia enabled readers to make their own measurements and calculations of both the heavens and the earth. Through the experience of manipulating the instruments, the readers became participants in sixteenth century mathematical culture, and thus mathematical amateurs. I conclude that the presence of these mathematical amateurs contributed to a much broader social base for the cultural shift towards an empirical understanding of nature from 1500 to 1700.


scholarly journals Philip Neri and Charles Borromeo as Models of Catholic Reform

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Charles D. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Institutional Reform ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church

AbstractIn the face of the external challenge of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the internal threat of spiritual, moral, and disciplinary corruption, two Catholic saints worked tirelessly to reform the Church in different but complementary ways. Philip Neri (1515–95) and Charles Borromeo (1538–84) led the Catholic Counter–Reformation during the middle–to–late sixteenth century, placing their distinctive gifts at the service of the Church. Philip Neri used his personal humility, intelligence, and charisma to attract the people of Rome to Christ, while Charles Borromeo employed his gifts for administration and his experience as a top aide to the pope to promote needed institutional reform. Both men achieved great personal holiness and moved others to holiness of life. It is their response to and sharing of the ‘universal call to holiness’, then, that constitutes the core of both of their approaches to ecclesial reform. Their focus on holiness, expressed in an emphasis on either the ‘charismatic’ or ‘hierarchical’ dimensions of the Church’s life, also provides a model for today’s Church, scarred as she is by scandal and in need of a new movement of reform.

scholarly journals Teachers Must Read: Imagining and Instructing the Teacher-as-Reader in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (pp 7-48)

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Murray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
English Canada ◽  
Formal Training ◽  
Upper Canada ◽  
School Councils ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Book Selection ◽  
Reading Choices ◽  
Early English

In early English Canada, educational journals played a critical role in the creation of an informed reading public, not only instructing school councils and iteachers in the best ways to teach reading and to promote literacy, but also in guiding the reading choices and practices of the adult audiences they addressed. This included,  most crucially, the teachers themselves, who for much of the nineteenth century may very well have received an irregular education, and little formal training for the work. This essay surveys more than 160 items devoted to the topics of book selection, literary morality, profitable reading, and the pleasures of books, in nineteenth-century educational journals published in Upper Canada/Canada West/Ontario, tracking the ways the teacher-reader was envisaged in these periodicals, and exhorted to self-culture as moral, emotional, and intellectual preparation for his (and, increasingly, her) vocation.

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