Hebraism in Sixteenth-Century England: Robert and Thomas Wakefield

<i>Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England</i>. Mary Thomas Crane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+227.

Fraunce's work is all the more significant because the reception of Spanish poetry in sixteenth-century England was limited, so far as judged from the record of published translations. Pointed to this example of the recognition of the rhetorical exemplarity of Spanish verse, in the remainder of this essay address the more voluminous output of English translators of Spanish prose. These are the most printed literary translations: of course, numerous other works, often paraliterary, were also translated. These best-selling translations have various features in common. Another very important feature which these works share is a mannered, what we would call rhetorical, style, which is the subject of this paper. In this essay the author has pointed to some indications that these readers were rhetorical readers as described by Kintgen and Mack. These rhetorical readers, when they read outside the Latin curriculum, looked for a mannered style in which the Spanish excelled. Keywords:learning style; rhetorical readers; sixteenth-century england; spaniards; Spanish; translations

The ideal of justice played an important role in sixteenth century England, but the legal system could be difficult to navigate even for the most adept, let alone for those without the advantages of wealth, education or political connections. Most people were not legal experts, but a striking feature of life in early modern England was that a very wide section of society was able to gain access to legal advice from a variety of sources, whether professional or otherwise. With the help of such advice, a larger number of people than one might expect were able to make use of the legal system and gain redress for their grievances. Focussing on the Thames Valley in the mid sixteenth century, this article explores the rhetoric and reality of access to justice. As in all societies, ignorance, poverty, inertia and corruption impeded the realisation of any ideal form of justice, but for many people in sixteenth century England the reality was at least close enough to the ideal to be recognisable as such. In 1553, Sir Francis Stonor was much in need of consolation. His father had been dead for three years, but the 33-year-old Sir Francis proved to be a poor steward of his inheritance. In fact, he was so poor a steward that he had landed himself in the Fleet, imprisoned for bad debts of several hundred pounds. At least he had with him his servant John Passy, who tells us that he attended upon his master “and read unto him [from Livy] and other writers in the Latin tongue”.1 Passy’s attempts at a more practical resolution of his master’s problems ended disastrously. Through various intermediaries, he introduced him to Walter Loveden, a substantial Berkshire landowner, who offered to lend Sir Francis enough to pay his debts, secured – as one would expect – by substantial mortgages. Sadly, Sir Francis’ knowledge of the classics was apparently better than his knowledge of the law, and Walter Loveden succeeded in relieving him

A series of illustrative ballads provide evidence of tetradysmelia, including acheiropodia, from sixteenth century England. It is probable that the presented malformations represent the non-genetic Hanhart complex. Such a condition has not been reported in archaeologically retrieved skeletal material.

People’s fascination with sixteenth-century England appears unending. From The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 to The Other Boleyn Girl in 2008, the public has shown a growing enthusiasm for historical movies and television shows on this time period. Showtime’s The Tudors—actually only about Henry VIII, not the later Tudors—is mostly known for its sexualized view of history and sometime grotesque violence. As Jake Martin puts it, the show is “part stilted historical drama, part soft-core pornography.”1 But there are aspects of the series that go beyond that, with some interesting characterizations and shifting points of view, so that characters who are sympathetic at one point become far less so, and unpleasant characters gain our understanding. One theme is the occasional deep tenderness that Jonathan Rhys-Myer’s Henry shows toward his young children. Along with all the adult drama, The Tudors shows that the royal children and the king’s deep concern for a legitimate heir to the throne are central to understanding the political events that occurred in sixteenth century England.

THIS study has tried to show how and why the volume, commodity structure and geographical spread of trade changed over two centuries. Basing itself on statistics, good and bad, and examining the causes of the developments they reveal, it follows the example and draws on the work of most historians who have written on the subject during the past thirty years and more. The signpost that most clearly marked the turn away from earlier lines of approach to the subject was F. J. Fisher’s article, ‘Commercial Trends and Policy in Sixteenth century England’ in the Economic History Review Vol. X (1940), although some older work had foreshadowed it. Most older works were written in terms of the organisation of merchant companies rather than of actual trade and traders. Few of these companies were trading organisations; they had secondary functions as organisations to which traders in particular areas had to belong, which imposed restrictions of some kind on the activities of members and non-members. But they were conspicuous institutions in their day, and had real importance in relation to governments at home and abroad. The organisation of trade, and the part they played in some areas of it, require some consideration here.

The State and the Child in Sixteenth-Century England--II

Writers in sixteenth-century England often kept commonplace books in which to jot down notable fragments encountered during reading or conversation, but few critics have fully appreciated the formative influence this activity had on humanism. Focusing on the discursive practices of textual fragments and or forming, arranging, and assimilating them, Mary Crane shows how keeping commonplace books made up the English humanists' central transaction with antiquity and provided an influential model for authorial practice and authoritative self-fashioning. She thereby revises our perceptions of English humanism, revealing its emphasis on sayings, collectivism, shared resources, anonymous inscription, and balance of power--in contrast to an aristocratic mode of thought, which championed individualism, imperialism, and strong assertion of authorial voice.Crane first explores the theory of gathering and framing as articulated in influential sixteenth-century logic and rhetoric texts and in the pedagogical theory with which they were linked in the humanist project. She then investigates the practice of humanist discourse through a series of texts that exemplify the notebook method of composition. These texts include school curricula, political and economic treatises (such as More's Utopia), contemporary biography, and collections of epigrams and poetic miscellanies.Originally published in 1993.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.

ABSTRACTResponding to calls for scholars to address ‘material worlds’ in our analyses of protests past, the paper examines the more-than-human historical geographies of enclosure and enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England. It argues that negotiating enclosure – in the sense of both promoting and resisting private property rights – was dependent on particular assemblages of people, animals and things and their convergence within specific spaces and temporalities. Particular attention is paid to mundane and everyday objects entangled in enclosure protest and the ways these assemblages might transform objects’ meanings, rendering them threatening or disobedient. Moreover, repurposing these things offered opportunities to re-make space, concretising or resisting particular claims to access or possession at the local level. It contributed too to the ongoing debate out of which new concepts of property eventually emerged, so that interrogating the materialities of enclosure protest offers vital space in which to rethink the makings of our modern world.

If vision was the noblest of the senses from Plato to Descartes, as Martin Jay has suggested, the last century of its reign was troubled by a succession crisis.1 In sixteenth-century England, debates over the value of visual experience produced an anxiety over the use of images that extended beyond religious prohibitions against idolatry to a broad range of representational practices. While of all the senses the eyes were routinely credited with offering the most direct access to the world, they were also considered most susceptible to misrecognition or illusion.2 This paradox is important for the present study, as it offered a particularly rich reserve for literary artists to represent the vexed relationship between ethical action and perception. If the world observed with the eyes provides a trustworthy guide for the ethical subject, the quality of one’s moral reasoning is the basis on which one’s ethical character is best judged. On the other hand, if the world revealed to visual experience is less stable, the challenge to the ethical subject becomes much greater. It is not surprising, then, that we witness an attempt to separate the reasoned, stable, and implicitly verbal world of morality from the unstable, emotional realm of visual experience in sixteenth-century England. This effort to compartmentalize vision and cognition—associated with images and words, respectively—provides an important context for the literary interest in the ethics of responding to the visual.

Selling the Tudor monarchy. Authority and image in sixteenth-century England. By Kevin Sharpe. Pp. xxix+588 incl. 66 ills. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2009. £30. 978 0 300 14098 9 - Volume 61 Issue 4

Early modern medicine favoured flight as the best prophylactic against epidemic disease. Theologically, however, flight savoured of an attempt to defy divine providence, or a dereliction of Christian charity, while staying could seem an act of presumption or recklessness. This essay studies six theologians whose writings on the issue circulated in sixteenth-century England. Long dismissed as inconclusive and derivative, these ‘flight theologies’ can be better understood as products of theological principle and communal experience, whose combined influence precluded definitive prescriptions. Instead, authors marshalled the rhetoric of ‘conscience’ to displace the decision back onto their readers, while retaining interpretive authority over the key factors of Scripture and personal obligations. Flight theology thus seeks less to solve a practical problem, than to produce a particular kind of political subjectivity, bound to the community and predicated on persuasion. In so doing, the discourse fuelled the emergence of an early modern English public sphere.

Reviews: History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence., a Companion to Bede, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England, Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, the Ends of Life:

This chapter offers an examination of the manner in which female courtiers participated in politics during the foundation of the Elizabethan age by demonstrating the extent to which the agency of the previously unstudied Elisabeth Parr, Marchioness of Northampton, was a part of court affairs, confirming the political importance of female agency in sixteenth-century England. Parr's agency in the Habsburg suit seems positive and well conceived in order to advance Elizabeth's reputation and marital project. In the case of Parr's agency in the Swedish suit, however, rather the opposite was true. The involvement of Elisabeth Parr in the rejection of the Swedish suit in 1562 is a clear illustration of the depth at which women could be and were involved in diplomatic and political activity at Elizabeth's court. In order to assert her monarchic authority, Elizabeth herself distinguished between her corporeal body and the body politic that she embodied. Keywords: early Elizabethan court; Elisabeth Parr; female agency; Habsburg suit; sixteenth-century England; Swedish suit