Dismembered Rhetoric describes the rhetoric of devotional publications by the Catholic secret presses between 1580 and 1603. A myth persists of a chasm between the Protestant battle cry of "Bible" and the Catholic approach to the laity through sacrament rather than word. However, Catholic authors did employ formal rhetoric to guide the devotions of the reader. Writers such as Robert Persons, William Allen, Henry Garnet, Edmund Campion, and Robert Southwell recognized that these techniques did not emasculate the chaste prose of their "shining band of martyrs.".
Rhetoric and the Familiar examines the writing and oratory of Francis Bacon and John Donne from the perspective of the faculty psychology they both inherited. Both writers inherited the resources of the classical rhetorical tradition through their university education. The book traces, from within that tradition, the sources of Bacon and Donne’s ideas about the processes of mental image making, reasoning, and passionate feeling. It analyzes how knowledge about those mental processes underlies the rhetorical planning of texts by Bacon, such as New Atlantis, Essayes or Counsels, Novum Organum, and the parliamentary speeches, and of texts by Donne such as the Verse Letters, Essayes in Divinity, Holy Sonnets, and the sermons. The book argues that their rhetorical practices reflect a common appropriation of ideas about mental process from faculty psychology, and that they deploy it in divergent ways depending on their rhetorical contexts. It demonstrates the vital importance, in early modern thinking about rhetoric, of considering what familiar remembered material will occur to a given audience, how that differs according to context, as well as the problems the familiar entails.
If among the many truths of Giambattista Vico's New Science there is one that is deepest, it is the truth that language, mind, and society are but three modes of a common reality. In Vico's term, that reality is the monde civile, the world of man. It is a world of many guises and faces. If reflected in a mirror, those faces would reveal an image of the full array of contemporary arts and sciences, all the disciplines of learning and technique by which, so Vico judged, humanity attains its perfection. Humanity in its perfection, however, is so rare a moment, so delicate and subtle a state, that it is never to be found among the nations of the world -- or is found in so fragile a form that it threatens always to crack and fall to the ground. In the West, a persistent line of thinking that has flourished from time to time holds that language is primary in culture, metaphor a necessity, and jurisprudence our highest achievement. This was the position of Vico, who not only received and cherished the tradition, but looked deeply into it, saw what its principles implied, and so made ready for the great social theorists of the nineteenth century. That is the thesis of this work. After an introductory chapter on Vico himself -- in which his intellectual world and his movements within it are sketched -- the work unfolds in three parts. These parts successively treat rhetoric, pedagogy, and culture, each proceeding from a major Vichian text.
This collection of original essays by literary critics and historians analyzes a wide range of Milton’s writing, from his early poetry, through his mid-century political prose, to De Doctrina Christiana, which was unpublished in his lifetime, and finally to his last and greatest poems. The contributors investigate the rich variety of approaches to Milton’s engagement with Catholicism and its relationship to reformed religion. The essays address latent tensions and contradictions, explore the nuances of Milton’s relationship to the easy commonplaces of Protestant compatriots, and disclose the polemical strategies and tactics that often shape that engagement. The contributors link Milton and Catholicism with early modern confessional conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that in turn led to new models and standards of authority, scholarship, and interiority. In Milton’s case, he deployed anti-Catholicism as a rhetorical device and the negative example out of which Protestants could shape their identity. The contributors argue that Milton’s anti-Catholicism aligns with his understanding of inwardness and conscience and illuminates one of the central conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period. Building on recent scholarship on Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses over the English Tudor and Stuart period, new understandings of martyrdom, and scholarship on Catholic women, Milton and Catholicism, provides a diverse and multifaceted investigation into a complex and little-explored field in Milton studies. Contributors: Alastair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell, Thomas N. Corns, Ronald Corthell, Angelica Duran, Martin Dzelzainis, John Flood, Estelle Haan, and Elizabeth Sauer.
Placing ‘literature’ at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.
Redescribing renaissance literature as a battleground of competing “theologies of language,” Baumlin reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Donne’s Songs and Sonets, and Milton’s “Lycidas” within a revisionist history of rhetoric: these works, Baumlin argues, mark stages in the Weberian Entzauberung or “disenchantment” of literature, as they move from the word-magic of medieval Catholicism to a puritan-reformed “rhetoric of certitude.” Historians of rhetoric, of Reformation theology, and of renaissance literature will find this a carefully-argued, controversial, ground-breaking study.
How can one make state administrative systems interesting, embody an abstract public ethos and give heroism to homogeneity? The discipline of literature and bureaucracy dismisses Weber's 'neurocrat'. Milton, Trollope and Hare are case studies on implementing the 'what if' visions literature explored during a period of great change in public service
Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities
Christians in post-Reformation England inhabited a culture of conversion. Required to choose among rival forms of worship, many would cross - and often recross - the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This study considers the poetry written by such converts, from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of James II, concentrating on four figures: John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden. Murray offers a context for each poet's conversion within the era's polemical and controversial literature. She also elaborates on the formal features of the poems themselves, demonstrating how the language of poetry could express both spiritual and ecclesiastical change with particular vividness and power. Proposing conversion as a catalyst for some of the most innovative devotional poetry of the period, both canonical and uncanonical, this study will be of interest to all specialists in early modern English literature.
