scholarly journals “The gully-hole of literature”: On the enregisterment of cant language in seventeenth-century England.

Sederi ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 99-117
Author(s):  
Paula Schintu
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Social ◽  
English Population ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

This essay places seventeenth-century literary renditions of cant, the language spoken by rogues and criminals in Early Modern England, into the context of “enregisterment” so as to examine its role in the process of recognition, categorization and legitimation of the canting tongue and the values it entailed. Literary representations of this variety became common in the period under analysis as a result of the criminal element that threatened the English population. Drama emerged as one of the main vehicles for the representation of cant, leading to the appearance of numerous plays that dealt with the life and adventures of English rogues. In the pages that follow, it will be argued that the study of these textual artefacts can provide valuable historical insight into the use of cant and the social connotations associated with it. In fact, the corpus-based analysis of the plays selected for this study has made it possible to identify both a common lexical repertoire and a set of sociocultural features that were associated with this underworld variety and its wicked speakers by the London non-canting audience. At the same time, it has shed light on the processes whereby this encoded speech came to index derogatory cultural values, which were spread and consumed thanks, in part, to dramatic performance, leading to the enregisterment of cant language and its recognition as a stable and unique linguistic variety.

scholarly journals Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-49
Author(s):  
Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Delivery ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Shed Light

Teaching Punctuation in Early Modern England Much has been written on the punctuation practice of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers in order to work out the ultimate function of marks of punctuation. The main point of discussion has almost ever been whether punctuation indicated syntactic relationships or represented speech pauses either to give emphasis in oral delivery or just to be able to breathe. The focus of this paper, however, is the theory rather than the practice, in particular, the set of rules and conventions used by schoolmasters to guide students in their use of stops. Thus, textbooks used at the time to teach reading and writing will constitute our main sources of information to achieve the following aims: (i) to offer a classification of the different marks of punctuation described, (ii) to establish the functions schoolbooks assigned to punctuation marks in general, and (iii) to assess the importance schoolmasters gave to pointing. The results of this study - which follows the works by Ong (1944) and Salmon (1962, 1988) - will contribute to shed light on the ever-lasting debate on the principles guiding Early Modern English punctuation usage.

Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 261-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Convicted Felons ◽  
The Church

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

AN OPEN ELITE: THE PECULIARITIES OF CONNOISSEURSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

scholarly journals The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dramatic Rise

Abstract This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners, and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 1550–1624, and its role in discourses to do with social regulation, negative evaluation and moralizing. The other is to undertake a detailed comparison of Della Casa’s Galateo and, in particular, Brown and Levinson (1987). The major finding here is the close similarity between the two. Along the way, the paper also airs some theoretical distinctions relating to notions of politeness, notably the distinction between first- and second-order politeness, and touches on some of the features of the social context of Early Modern England.

Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: A Couple's Narrative of Family History in Early Modern Florence

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Calvi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Concrete Material ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
Shed Light

Trying to trace seventeenth-century Florentine family memoirs, I came upon a manuscript journal entirely written by a woman. Its frontispiece bore a date, 1623, and a heading: “In the name of God, the glorious Virgin Mary and all the saints of the Heavenly Court of Paradise, this book is the journal of signora Maddalena Nerli Tornabuoni, and in it she will keep a record of all her daily accounts starting from this very day in March 1623.“As the title specified, it was mainly an account book that covered twenty years of Maddalena's widowed life up to her death in 1641. Going carefully through its pages made me begin to perceive the boundaries of a domestic world organized and governed by a middle-aged urban patrician woman. It shed light on the social world she lived in, one of children, servants, close relatives, and sharecroppers; on the concrete material objects she was surrounded by—linens, foodstuffs, furniture, clothes, devotional items; and on the physical space she occupied—city and country homes, the district of S. Maria Novella and S. Giovanni in Florence.

Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela McShane
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Household Formation ◽  
Recruitment And Retention ◽  
The Social ◽  
Love Song ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis article revisits the “heroic and glamorous language” of recruitment and retention in seventeenth century England through an exploration of the market, medium and message of many hundreds of “military” ballads that were disseminated from London across the country, especially in times of war. These show that military volunteerism among the lower sorts was less surprising and more sophisticated than historians have previously imagined, which suggests the need to reconsider the question of military professionalism among ordinary rank and file soldiers. Furthermore, the common use of the love song as a vehicle for military messages, reveals how regular soldiering became a new vocation for the “lower sorts” in this transitional period for army development. This new “profession” not only marked a direct break from the older system of “estates” which put fighters at the top and workers at the bottom of society, it was negotiating its place within the social structures of household formation in early modern England.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Relationship

The recent upturn in biblically based films in Anglophone cinema is the departure point for this Afterword reflecting on the Bible’s impact on popular entertainment and literature in early modern England. Providing a survey of the book’s themes, and drawing together the central arguments, the discussion reminds that literary writers not only read and used the Bible in different ways to different ends, but also imbibed and scrutinized dominant interpretative principles and practices in their work. With this in mind, the Afterword outlines the need for further research into the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

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