scholarly journals Agency, Patronage and Power in Early Modern English Translation and Print Cultures: The Case of Thomas Hawkins

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176
Author(s):  
Marie-France Guénette
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
English Court ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Early English ◽  
National Biography ◽  
Literary Networks

At the English court of Queen consort Henrietta Maria (1625-1642), translation was used as a political tool, partly to impose the queen’s linguistic, cultural and Catholic heritage on Calvinist England. The queen played a pivotal role as a patron of the arts and an agent of Anglo-French cultural relations, and many translators dedicated texts to her in the hopes of winning her favour. This article focuses on “translating agents” (Buzelin, 2005), i.e. translators, printers and patrons, operating in the political, religious and literary networks in and around the Queen’s court. My research draws on scholarship on the cultural and ideological aspects of translation in Stuart Court culture and builds on recent studies on the intersection between translation and print in early modern Europe. I study patterns of patronage, literary production, and text circulation; and I probe the political, social, religious, and print networks involved in the production of translations associated with the Queen’s court, and extending well beyond its social or geographical boundaries. I examine translations using digital catalogues (Early English Books Online,Renaissance Cultural Crossroads,Cultural Crosscurrents in Stuart and Commonwealth Britain), and conduct paratextual analyses of translations dedicated to Henrietta Maria. In this article, I study translator Thomas Hawkins by using data fromSix Degrees of Francis Baconand theOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Hawkins was a key translating agent who operated in transnational Catholic print networks and whose translations of Jesuit Nicolas Caussin’sLa Cour Saintefound their way into social and literary networks around the Queen’s court. I situate Hawkins in the political and ideological contexts of the time and show how he promoted Catholic devotional literature in his capacity as agent of translation, culture and ideology. Hawkins’s case illustrates how agency, patronage and power come together in early modern England’s culture of printed translations.

People and Things: Power in Early English Development

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Biddick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Agrarian Capitalism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
European Development ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early English ◽  
Structural Matrix

Debate over the rise of agrarian capitalism in Europe has established the historiographic chronology, locus, and conceptualization of European development. Proponents of contending schools (the “commercial” or the “political”) have focused on the late medieval through early modern period in England as the crucial time and place of the transformation but argue whether agrarian capitalism derived from economic or political structures (Ashton and Philpin 1985).' Neither school has questioned the common methodology of mapping social and cultural transformation onto a structural matrix. Steps taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to decenter the European narrative of development have faltered at this same structuralist dilemma.

Pathos and Melancholy: Rethinking ‘Theatre’ in Times of Doubt

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-293
Author(s):  
HELMAR SCHRAMM ◽  
BARBARA SUŠEC MICHIELI
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Social Events ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Article Analyse

In times of crises and existential disorientation, the arts often lean on gestures of radical doubt, the articulation of which demands the art of masquerade, deception, diversion and dissimulation, and simultaneously includes characteristic constellations of pathos and melancholy. The authors of this article analyse different artistic projects in Slovenia, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, which were created in the breakthrough period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and connect these projects to the wider social events of the previous two decades. In their treatment of the contemporary ‘art of doubt’ they focus especially on the perspective of the political and existential and in addition point out the fundamental historical concepts of doubt which have influenced the development of theatre and experimental knowledge in Europe from the beginnings of the early modern era until today.

scholarly journals Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
The People ◽  
Early English ◽  
Henry More

Richard Baxter, one of the most famous Puritans of the seventeenth century, is generally known as a writer of practical and devotional literature. But he also excelled in knowledge of medieval and early modern scholastic theology, and was conversant with a wide variety of seventeenth-century philosophies. Baxter was among the early English polemicists to write against the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi in the years immediately following the establishment of the Royal Society. At the same time, he was friends with Robert Boyle and Matthew Hale, corresponded with Joseph Glanvill, and engaged in philosophical controversy with Henry More. This book is a chronological and thematic account of Baxter’s relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late seventeenth-century England. Drawing on largely unexamined works, including Baxter’s Methodus theologiae christianae (1681) and manuscript treatises and correspondence, this book discusses Baxter’s response to mechanical philosophers on the nature of substance, laws of motion, the soul, and ethics. Analysis of these topics is framed by a consideration of the growth of Christian Epicureanism in England, Baxter’s overall approach to reason and philosophy, and his attempt to understand creation as an analogical reflection of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, understood as vestigia Trinitatis. Baxter’s views on reason, analogical knowledge of God, and vestigia Trinitatis draw on medieval precedents and directly inform a largely hostile, though partially accommodating, response to mechanical philosophy.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

The Refusal of Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Dubreuil
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
The Arts

Laurent Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics – toward a break from politics, the political and policies. Rather than yet another re-articulation, he calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable. The first chapter situates the refusal of politics in relation to different contemporary theoretical attempts to renew politics, and makes the case for a greater rupture. The second moment takes up what is liveable in life by way of apolitical experience, in contrast to appropriations of the collective, including a discussion of the arts. Finally, Dubreuil draws up an incomplete inventory of means: forms of existence – often frail and fleeting – that make an exit toward atopia.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

The Folly of the Cross

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Satisfaction Model

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.

Stuart Succession Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Distinguished Group ◽  
Modern British Literature

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

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