Thomas Fuller
Thomas Fuller

Author: W. B. Patterson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-02

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0192512404

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Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history—sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events—reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution. The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.

The Eighteenth Century English Novel
The Eighteenth Century English Novel

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1438114931

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Early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne helped create the formula for the modern novel.

Like Angels from a Cloud
Like Angels from a Cloud

Author: Horton Davies

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2004-10-08

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1725212471

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This is the very first study made in depth and detail of over forty Anglican preachers in the Golden Age of the English Pulpit. There have been individual studies of the sermons of Donne and Andrewes, but none of the metaphysical preachers as a whole. It is the aim of this book to introduce to the reader some of the less familiar preachers: men such as John Hacket and Ralph Brownrig, Calvinist preachers in the metaphysical style such as the Elizabethan Henry Smith (known as silver-tongued for his oratory), or Thomas Adams, who was styled the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians. These men, and others, were widely admired in their day and, in many cases, their contemporary popularity challenged that even of Donne. This study provides explanations for the popularity of the metaphysical style, and incidentally proves untenable the stereotype that all the metaphysical preachers were of the Arminian persuasion, since a fair proportion of the group were Calvinists who rejected the Puritan plain style in favor of a metaphysical mode of expression. One explanation of the popularity of this style for a period of some fifty years is that practically every metaphysical divine was also a poet, and that daring imagery, wit, and arcane knowledge were the chief differentia of this style of poetry. Furthermore, James I and Charles I were great admirers of wit and learning. They chose royal chaplains for these qualities: learning made them good apologists, and their wit kept the captive congregations at court intrigued. Equal attention is given to the biographies of the preachers, the themes of their sermons, and the techniques of preaching and sermon construction, with separate chapters on learning and eloquence, wit and imagery, and the uses to which they were put. The result is a full picture of the group of seventeenth-century divines who preached like angels from a cloud.