Inventing Figures of Speech

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

This chapter is a study of the significance of figures of speech to humanist pedagogy’s attempt to divorce style from the invention of an argument and the judgment of its validity. The significance of figures to this attempt turned on a set of questions that preoccupied humanist teachers: Is language instrumental to thinking and do figures of speech act as constitutive structures of the mind? Or, is language simply ornamental to thinking? Is its work therefore dictated by mental operations from which these figures are excluded? Focusing on a series of pedagogical reforms adhering to the principles of Peter Ramus, it argues that a wide range of early modern teachers proposed an answer to these questions by subordinating the figures of elocutio to the places of inventio and inscribing the relative value of the one to the other into a paradigmatic account of the compositional process. Attending to the figure of epanodos in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, this chapter describes a counterfeit art of indecorous thinking in which figures of speech act as structures of the mind and establish the parameters of possibility for the imaginary worlds of early modern literature.

The Spectacle of Care: From Figure to Form

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Renaissance Studies ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

The introduction provides a concise account of the widespread popularity of figures of speech in early modern literature as well as the humanist schoolrooms in which both writers and readers were trained to recognize and wield these instruments of ornamentation. It suggests that the relative neglect of figures of speech within histories of style as well as Renaissance studies more broadly speaks to literary studies’ quiet internalization of the very aesthetic principle against which poets like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth worked: that good art pretends to be made up of something other than artifice. It argues that a poetic theory that takes seriously experiments with artifice at its most conspicuous challenges us to revise our accounts of literary world-making. Rather than understanding conspicuous artifice as a violation of decorum and verisimilitude, it shows how the indecorous thinking of figures of speech established the parameters of possibility for poetry’s privileged domain of “what may be.” Finally, it argues for a revaluation of the concept of form in literary studies from the perspective of figures of speech.

Custom and Habit in Physiology and the Science of Human Nature in the British Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 183-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
David Hume ◽  
The Body ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
William Cullen ◽  
Philosophical Writings

In this paper I show how what came to be known as “the double law of habit,” first formulated by Joseph Butler in a discussion of moral psychology in 1736, was taken up and developed by medical physiologists William Porterfield, Robert Whytt, and William Cullen as they disputed fundamental questions regarding the influence of the mind on the body, the possibility of unconscious mental processes, and the nature and extent of voluntary action. The paper shows, on a particular topic, the overlap between eighteenth-century philosophical writings on the science of human nature on the one hand, and medical writings and lectures in physiology on the other. Other early modern writers discussed in the paper include René Descartes, Herman Boerhaave and David Hume.


scholarly journals "Acquire and Beget a Temperance": The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Gillian Chell Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Control Comparison ◽  
The One ◽  
The Faerie Queene

<p>Shakespeare's Hamlet, like Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQII and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQII, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts "Know Thyself", "Nothing in Excess' and "Think Mortal Thoughts." To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQII makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQII and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius' apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from "false prudence" as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, "this canker of our nature," he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQII and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance.</p>

Passion’s Fictions

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-226
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Real Roots ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Character Criticism ◽  
The Mind

The final chapter consolidates the implications of the foregoing argument for the interpretation of early modern literature, in part by returning to the start of the story, in Shakespeare; but it approaches Shakespeare by way of an eighteenth-century phenomenon: the rise of works of “character criticism” represented for example by William Richardson’s essays. Eighteenth-century character criticism has long been seen as a new way of reading Shakespeare, even the intrusion of something foreign to Shakespeare’s plays. The word for that foreign element is often “psychology,” especially as allied to reading practices associated with the novel. This chapter argues that the real roots of character criticism lie in much older theories of the passions. The psychology at work is not nearly as new as has been claimed, as can be seen by contrasting Richardson’s essays with one of the books he cites: Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The chapter then circles back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays already contain the elements of a psychology: an externalist psychology grounded in rhetoric and its account of the circumstantial mimesis of actions as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Shakespeare’s plays could become the material for a science of the passions because in some sense they already were: instances of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions produced according to principles first theorized by rhetoric, which themselves shaped the new sciences of the mind that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

scholarly journals "Acquire and Beget a Temperance": The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Gillian Chell Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Control Comparison ◽  
The One ◽  
The Faerie Queene

<p>Shakespeare's Hamlet, like Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQII and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQII, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts "Know Thyself", "Nothing in Excess' and "Think Mortal Thoughts." To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQII makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQII and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius' apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from "false prudence" as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, "this canker of our nature," he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQII and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance.</p>

The Undoing of a Man: Cuckoldry in Heywood's Edward IV

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-267
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Social Construct

Manhood was a complex social construct in early modern England. Males could not simply mature or grow from boys to men. Instead, they had to assert or prove they were men in multiple ways, such as growing a beard, behaving courageously in battle, exercising self-control in walking, talking, weeping, eating, and drinking, pursuing manly interests, exhibiting manly behaviors, avoiding interests or behaviors typically ascribed to women, marrying a woman and providing for her physical, sexual, and spiritual needs, and living and dying as a faithful Christian. Once a male became a “man” in the eyes of others, his efforts shifted from “making” himself manly to maintaining or defending his reputation as a “true man.” All men could undermine their manhood through their own actions or inactions, but the married man could also lose his reputation through his wife's infidelity. Numerous literary husbands in early modern literature live anxiously with the knowledge they might suffer a cuckold's humiliation and shame. Matthew Shore, who “treasures” his wife to a fault in Thomas Heywood's two-part play Edward IV, is an exceptional example of such a husband. This critical reading of Edward IV explores the complexity of manhood in Heywood's day by showing various males trying to assert or defend their manhood; explaining why husbands had reasons to fear cuckoldry; analyzing how Jane Shore's infidelity affects her husband; following Matthew Shore's journey from trusting husband to distrusting, bitter cuckold, to forgiving husband; and examining his seemingly inexplicable death at the end of the play.

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