Anne Phoenix
Anne Phoenix

Author: David Como

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1351958062

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Unfamiliar today, The saints legacies... by Anne Fenwick (pseudonym Anne Phoenix) was a modest but unquestionable best seller. First published in 1629, it went through no fewer than thirteen editions between then and 1688. Most of the many thousands of Stuart readers would not have known that it was such a rare specimen: a work of godly practical divinity written by a woman. Anne Fenwick was a charismatic puritan, known for her zealous and radical non-conformist activities. She was arrested and tried before the Durham High Commission, after being targeted by the notoriously anti-puritan Bishop Neile, escaped from house arrest by May 1624 and became a noted author of religious writings. In 1629 one of her manuscripts, A collection of certaine promises out of the word of God, was published without her knowledge by the printer Robert Swayne, but the more definitive edition reproduced here was published by Michael Sparke in 1631. This edition was published with her consent and includes her prefatory letter, in which she explains the circumstances of the initial publication, and notes that she passed her own 'perfect copy' of the book to Swayne. It is reasonable to assume that this edition represents the version most faithful to the author's own manuscript and intentions. The knowledge that there was space for such a woman within the early Stuart puritan community - simultaneously prophetess, scriptual exegete and published writer - offers insight into the dramatic explosion of women's preaching and writing in the 1640s and 1650s.

George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety
George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety

Author: Ceri Sullivan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-04-25

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0198906838

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Contemporary nudge theory points out that people make good choices over issues where they have had past experience of similar circumstances, where there is reliable, substantial, and relevant information about the situation, and where they will get prompt feedback about the effect of their decision. Yet none of these conditions apply to the most vital choice of action facing early modern Protestants: how can they be saved? In George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety, Ceri Sullivan uses nudge theory to show how practical divinity disregards the doleful conclusions of predestination--that salvation cannot be earned--to supply readers with suggestions on how to prepare to act, regardless of their final destiny. Such texts create cognitive niches to support cheerful, godly thought and action, in a way which is far from being despairing or compulsive. Their nudges were repeatedly put into practice by Herbert's friends, the Ferrars, who tried to form an ideal religious community at Little Gidding. These prescriptions and examples illustrate how George Herbert's The Temple (1633) is a compendium of the techniques of choice architecture. Herbert's poems are full of the humour emerging from a life of faith which is willing to guard high ideals by low cunning, stooping to use the least little things to change a self. George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety initially calls on theories of the extended mind to ask what sort of minor physical and social structures scaffold decisions, then examines a selection of nudges used by Herbert: contracts with the self, building a mind, cleaning a heart, conversing with God, making to-do lists, and working on working well.

The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-century Anti-Providential Thought
The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-century Anti-Providential Thought

Author: Ann Thompson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1351760734

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This title was first published in 2003. 'The art of suffering' is one of many strands of literature on suffering published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book explores through the art of suffering the way in which the meaning for suffering, which the seventeenth century inherited from the Middle Ages and which centres on the role of suffering as a manifestation of the hand of God in the process of salvation, is refined and enhanced by successive puritan writers only to crumble under the impact of emerging anti-providential thought. It goes on to explore the challenge which the absence of meaning for suffering presents to the Judaeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent and infinitely good God, and the ways in which themes and doctrines already present in the literature on suffering are reshaped and recombined to defend the omnipotence and infinite goodness of God.