scholarly journals Transatlantic Lifelines: Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sauer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
English Identity ◽  
British North American ◽  
Poetic Creation

The legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, the distinguished Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the subject of numerous claims to memorialization. On 17 October 1586 Sidney died in battle at Arnhem in the United Netherlands. Less than a week later, his corpse was transported to Flushing, of which Sidney had been Governor, and in the following year Sidney’s body was “interr’d in stately Pauls”, as recorded by Anne Dudley Bradstreet—the first known poet of the British North American colonies. While Bradstreet is omitted from most early modern and contemporary literary accounts of Sidney’s legacy, this article demonstrates that Bradstreet’s commemoration of Sidney from across the Atlantic presents new insights into his afterlife and the female poet’s formulations of early modern nationhood. Bradstreet’s first formal poem, “An Elegie upon that Honorable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (comp. 1637–8), was a tribute to Sidney as well as to her own Anglo-American literary heritage and England’s rolls. Bradstreet exhibits her complex relationship to Sidney along the same lines that she reconceives her English identity. A comparison of the two published seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s elegiac poem (1650, 1678) shows how she translates descent and lineage from kinship (and kingship) into poetic creation. In the process, Bradstreet takes her place not only as a “semi-Sidney”, as Josuah Sylvester characterized Sidney’s descendants, but also as a Sidneian Muse—in America.

scholarly journals A NEW MAGNA CARTA FOR THE EARLY MODERN COMMON LAW: AN 800TH ANNIVERSARY ESSAY

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Witte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
King John

AbstractThis article examines the influence of the Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition, especially in the seventeenth century. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, the Magna Carta set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. The Magna Carta served as an inspiration for seventeenth-century English jurists, like Sir Edward Coke, and Puritan pamphleteers, like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the charter. It also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, most notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, which anticipated many of the constitutional rights formulations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

scholarly journals The Historical Role of Leviticus 25 in Naturalizing Anti-Black Racism

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 570
Author(s):  
James W. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
High Probability ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Permanent Property

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Retinal Image ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Optical Devices ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Optical Technology ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Subject

This chapter introduces the study by providing an overview of the epistemological, ethical, social, and political issues surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision in early modern England. It lays out the key optical developments of the period, including the invention of the telescope and the microscope, and provides a brief synopsis of Johannes Kepler’s theory of the retinal image, which over the course of the seventeenth century gradually came to replace older, species-based models of vision. This context having been established, the introduction describes the general contours of the debate surrounding the efficacy and ethics of optical technology in the seventeenth century and identifies and introduces the major works to be discussed in subsequent chapters. It closes with an explanation of the study’s methodological approach, which is to read the texts it includes not only as being about optical devices but also as acting as optical devices—literary lenses that can be used to reveal the hidden motivations, assumptions, and desires present within their words.

Performing the Self and Staging the Other: Scripting the Legend of Lucretia in Early Modern England

Paragrana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Sarah D. R. Sallmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
And Control

AbstractIn England, throughout the early modern period and beyond, the Rape of Lucretia served as a central intertext for literary and non-literary works engaging with the subject of transgression. Not only did legal tracts and social pamphlets prescribe a woman to behave analogously to Lucretia after rape in order to contest the innocence of her soul through her bodily performance. Allegorically, the legend′s iteration within new cultural contexts in contemporary English historiography and drama provided a powerful subtext with which national histories and identities were scripted according to a familiar plot structure in order to represent 'the Turk′ and thereby to interpret and control what was perceived to be a threat to English identity and sovereignty at a time of intensifying Anglo-Ottoman encounters. This paper not only demonstrates the re-staging of the Rape of Lucretia in different texts and contexts; it examines the way in which the national identities and cultural encounters are represented and performed through the legend in order to stage the self and the Other within the radical discourse of alterity in contemporary proto-orientalist contexts.

scholarly journals The Gates of Charity: Images of City and Community in the Early Modern Dutch Orphanage

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 1000-1020
Author(s):  
Hanneke van Asperen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Holy Ghost ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Civic Pride ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

In the seventeenth century, Dutch charitable institutions were the subject of international praise and the object of civic pride, and their public façades communicated a message of central importance to its citizens. In this essay, I examine the iconography of seventeenth-century “gates of charity,” focusing on the almoner’s orphanage in Gouda and the Holy Ghost orphanage in Leiden. I relate them to other orphanages in the Dutch Republic to show developments in their iconography. The façade decorations demonstrate the responsibilities of the city as benefactor, the expectations of its citizens and the supposed effects of charity upon the community. At the gates, the worlds of the rich and the poor collided. Here, charity could flourish making the community a mirror image of the heavenly realm. The gate portrays the perfect society as one that assists its poor and strengthens its communal ties.

Collective Violence in the British Atlantic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Political Turmoil

This chapter is a brief survey of collective violence across the early modern Anglo-American world. It illustrates how the legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America. Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early modern Anglo-American legal landscape. Group violence in the British Atlantic was usually nonlethal in intention and consequence but it occasionally shaded, particularly in the seventeenth century in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, into rebellions and riots that took multiple lives. In the years before and after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Americans transformed older British notions and practices of crowd action and imbued them with new meanings amid the egalitarian and reformist implications of the Revolution and the early American Republic.

Divine Poetry? Early Modern European Orientalists on the Beauty of the Koran

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Loop
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Islamic Belief

AbstractThis article discusses Western attitudes to the style of the Koran from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The subject is of particular interest because the question of the Koran's aesthetic value is ultimately linked with the Islamic belief that the inimitable beauty of Muhammad's revelation is the very proof of its divine origin (i'jāz al-Qur'ān). Given the apologetic function of this doctrine in Islamic theology, many early modern European orientalists, from Theodor Bibliander to Ludovico Marracci, criticised the style. Some of the arguments presented were remarkably persistent and can be followed up to the present day. This article also shows, however, that since the end of the seventeenth century scholars such as Andreas Acoluthus, George Sale and Claude-Etienne Savary had developed a more favourable attitude to the Koranic style, while, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Prophet Muhammad was seen as an inspired genius and the Koran as an example of 'divine poetry'.

scholarly journals Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: The Problem Of Social Reform and Marriage

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Farhana Wazir Khan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
The Public ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

The article focuses on Shakespeare’s play: Measure for Measure, with the aim of bringing to light the central problem of the play which is that of social reform and marriage in an early modern European society. It is a play that has been located against the background of seventeenth century society of London where it was first performed. However, it is symbolically set in the city of Vienna. Feminist and Historicist critics have been cited in the article in an interpretation of the play which requires a consideration of the role of women and their status in the playworld. The issues of private and public marriages, and the ambiguity governing the laws on marriage, form the complex problem raised in the play. It is the contention of the article that Shakespeare emphasized the need to regulate the legal system with a view to promote greater representation and voice to women who were victimized by the corrupt legal institutions, both religious and official. Thus, the article suggests that the developments in the position of women, and the questions as to whether they were married or single, were the subject of public concern and debate in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Marriage was, therefore, felt to be the most crucial issue in this regard and the aim of the dramatists and literary writers was to popularize the difficulties faced by women with a view to raising the consciousness of the public.

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