Thomas Fuller
Thomas Fuller

Author: William Brown Patterson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0198793707

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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.

Like Angels from a Cloud
Like Angels from a Cloud

Author: Horton Davies

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2004-10-08

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1592449344

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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.

Eating and Being
Eating and Being

Author: Steven Shapin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-11-20

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0226832228

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What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.