Author: Giuseppina Iacono Lobo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750120X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Revolutions of Conscience -- 1 Charles I, Eikon Basilike, and the Pulpit-Work of the King's Conscience -- 2 Oliver Cromwell and the Duties of Conscience -- 3 Early Quaker Writing and the Unifying Light of Conscience -- 4 Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Civilizing Force of Conscience -- 5 Lucy Hutchinson's Revisions of Conscience -- 6 Milton's Nation of Conscience -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Author: Joshua R. Held
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
"'Bold Conscience' chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint--what the author labels "cowardly conscience"--to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. Caught at the vortex of public and private concerns, the concept of the conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders on down to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the consequent regicide of King Charles I. Yet within this mix of perspectives, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting perspectives on bold conscience emerge from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices--Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors, in re-casting the idea of conscience as a private, interior, shameful state to one of boldness fit for the public realm, parallel a historical development in which the conscience becomes a platform both for royal power and for common dissent in post-Reformation England. With the 1649 regicide of King Charles I as a fulcrum that unites both literary and historical timelines, Held tracks the increasing power of the conscience from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry VIII to John Donne's court sermons, and finally to Milton's Areopagitica and Charles's defense of his kingship, Eikon Basilike. In a direct attack on Eikon Basilike, Milton destroys the prerogative of the royal conscience in Eikonoklastes, and later in Paradise Lost proposes an alternative basis for inner confidence, rooting it not in divine right but in the 'paradise within,' a metonym for conscience. Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study looks backward as well to the theological foundations of the concept in Luther of the 1520s and forward to its transformation by Locke into the term 'consciousness' in 1689. Ultimately, Held's study shows how the idea of a conscience in early modern England, long central to the private self and linked to the will, memory, and mind-emerges as a nexus between the private self and the realm of public action, a bulwark against absolute sovereignty, and its attenuation as a means of more limited, personal certainty. Whether in Milton's struggle against King Charles or Hamlet's against King Claudius, the conscience born of the Reformation becomes less a state of inner critique and more a form of outward expression fit for the communal life and commitments demanded by the early modern era"--
Author: Marco Sgarbi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3319141694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 3618
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Book Description
Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.
Author: Ryan Hackenbracht
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones. Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.
Author: W. Clark Gilpin
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271097922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Letters from prison testifying to deeply felt ethical principles have a long history, extending from antiquity to the present day. In the early modern era, the rise of printing houses helped turn these letters into a powerful form of political and religious resistance. W. Clark Gilpin’s fascinating book examines how letter writers in England—ranging from archbishops to Quaker women—consolidated the prison letter as a literary form. Drawing from a large collection of printed prison letters written from the reign of Henry VIII to the closing decades of the seventeenth century, Gilpin explores the genre's many facets within evolving contexts of reformation and revolution. The writers of these letters portrayed the prisoner of conscience as a distinct persona and the prison as a place of redemptive suffering where bearing witness had the power to change society. The Letter from Prison features a diverse cast of characters and a literary genre that combines drama and inspiration. It is sure to appeal to those interested in early modern England, prison literature, and cultural forms of resistance.
Author: Walter S H Lim
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031400062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.
Author: Emma Depledge
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198821891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.
Author: Ernest Renan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547145
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 535
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Book Description
Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.
Author: Edward Vallance
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843831181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
An assessment of the importance of oaths, and the taking of, and the idea of national covenants during a turbulent time in English history. This book studies the oaths and covenants taken during the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, a time of great religious and political upheaval, assessing their effect and importance. From the reign of Mary I to the Exclusion crisis, Protestant writers argued that England was a nation in covenant with God and urged that the country should renew its contract with the Lord through taking solemn oaths. In so doing, they radically modified understandings of monarchy, political allegiance and the royal succession. During the civil war, the tendering of oaths of allegiance, the Protestation of 1641 and the Vow and Covenant and Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 (all describedas embodiments of England's national covenant) also extended the boundaries of the political nation. The poor and illiterate, women as well as men, all subscribed to these tests of loyalty, which were presented as social contracts between the Parliament and the people. The Solemn League and Covenant in particular continued to provoke political controversy after 1649 and even into the 1690s many English Presbyterians still viewed themselves as bound by itsterms; the author argues that these covenants had a significant, and until now unrecognised, influence on 'politics-out-of-doors' in the eighteenth century. EDWARD VALLANCE is Lecturer in Early Modern British History, University of Liverpool.
Author: James Mackintosh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 812
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Book Description
