The Buchlov Copy of the Relief of Nectanebo from Bologna

This chapter briefly discusses three insights into early modern British engagement with risk: the presence of a distinct conceptual refinement in late seventeenth-century sources; the tight relationship between risk and trust in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and the character of the political subject, which is worked out in the early modern engagement with risk. Beyond these three observations, the chapter also argues that early modern British engagement with risk offers two narratives—views of risk that persist in our own time and shape our orientation toward an unknown future. These include accounts of risk as a threat to security, as well as depictions of risk as an opportunity to be exploited for profit or gain.

<i>Femke Molekamp</i> Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing<i>Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing</i>. Femke Molekamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix+266.

Reviewed by: Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith Diana Barnes Ross, Sarah C. E., Rosalind Smith, eds Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ( Early Modern Literature in History), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; hardback; pp. 370; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €99.00; ISBN 9783030429454. Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint. The essays are organized in four chronologically ordered sections, followed by an afterword. Part I, 'Sixteenth Century', comprises four chapters. Susan M. Felch contends that Anne Lock deployed prophetic and penitential complaint to instruct her readers and thus advance Calvinist Reform over the 1540s to 1590s. Micheline White outlines Katherine Parr's evolving use of religious complaint to lament on behalf of her husband, Henry VIII, in Psalms and Prayers (1544), and later, writing as the dowager queen, to urge for Protestant reform in Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner (1547). Tricia A. McElroy analyses the prevalence of female-voiced complaint in Scottish political propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s, when the ideal of wifely virtue was fraught following the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. Lindsay Ann Reid examines Isabella Whitney's adaptation of autobiographical affect derived from Ovid's Tristia rather than his Heroides to articulate careerist poetic ambitions in The Copy of a Letter (1566–67) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Part II, 'Seventeenth Century', includes four chapters. In the first, Emily Shortslef investigates Mary Cary's use of complaint to embrace anti-Stoic inconstancy in her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Paul Salzman examines how Mary Wroth employs the 'dirty pain' (p. 142) generated by complaint to 'bridge between the personal and political' (p. 138) in her manuscript play Love's Victory and in the second part of her romance Urania. Danielle Clarke tracks the 'interpellation of complaint (p. 158) indebted to Du Bartas through the writing of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne, Lady Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson. Sarah C. E. Ross challenges the association between Ovidian complaint and 'isolation, distortion, and deception' (p. 186), demonstrating how Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and John Milton use the Ovidian figure of Echo to construct female community within pastoral complaint. Part III, 'Restoration', contains three chapters. Gillian Wright considers Aphra Behn's complaint 'Oenone to Paris', in John Dryden's collection Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), to redirect critical attention from Dryden's theorization of translation towards the ideological and political implications of Restoration complaint. Whereas Dryden expressed 'clear signs of unease with royal sexual self-indulgence' (p. 210), Behn 'dramatiz[ed] conflicts between power and sexuality' (p. 219). Susan Wiseman extends the discussion of complaint to North America with a fascinating account of how Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is 'deeply mulched with the matter of complaint' (p. 233), adapting 'experiential testimony and...

While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.

This article discusses the use of performative techniques in prose accounts of the past written in early modern England. Building on scholarship that has located the source of early modern emotional engagement with the past in the history play, it shows that prose texts should be seen alongside history plays as forms that provided access to performance of historical characters. Chronicles, political texts, and other prose accounts of the past deployed invented speech, performative description, and interiorised characterisation at moments of heightened emotional and political intensity. Focusing as a case study on accounts of the reign of Edward II—which attracted substantial cross-genre attention, particularly from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, owing to its paradigmatic status as an exemplum of overmighty favourites and deposition, and which was shaped by writers of all genres into an emotionally compelling de casibus narrative structure—this article shows that the use of performative techniques in these texts facilitated both emotional and political engagement with the past. Attention to these performative elements of historical prose thus prompts us to reassess the complexity, interiority and vividness of chronicles; to reimagine the place of history plays in early modern culture, as one among many forms which provided access to performance of historical characters; and to augment our understanding of the process by which history was made usable; to reconfigure our understanding of the nature of early modern people’s relationship to the past, underlining the significance of the emotional dimension of that relationship alongside the utilitarian.

Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles, Talmudic texts, rabbinic writings, and Yiddish books that date back to the early modern period. This study explores a cross section of the Jewish and Hebrew books in Marsh’s collection, with particular focus on issues of materiality—that is, how these books as material artefacts can inform our understanding of early modern history, religion, and intercultural engagement. We suggest that these books, a majority of which come from Marsh’s personal collection, are a valuable resource for reflection on (1) Christian engagement with Jewish culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the production, use, and travel of Jewish books in early modern Europe, and (3) snapshots of Jewish life in early modern Ireland and beyond.

The level of public support for the March 2012 military coup d'état in Mali surprised many observers who viewed the country as a viable democracy and believed its inhabitants perceived it in the same light. This article suggests that, despite this favourable appraisal by certain outsiders, many Malians had low levels of confidence in the democracy of President Amadou Toumani Touré, considering it corrupt and dysfunctional. In light of such attitudes in the present, this article turns toward the past to draw lessons from Mali's history of démocratie de façade. It examines Mali's earliest engagement with democracy in the late colonial era, and the manner in which democratic political discourse was abused by Mali's first postcolonial government. It suggests that Malian leaders' long history of invoking democratic principles for non-democratic aims may have weakened the legitimacy of the government following the 2012 coup d'état, and could make the reestablishment of confidence in Mali's democracy a more challenging task than simply organizing new multi-party elections.

Collapsing buildings, unexpected meetings in the marketplace, monstrous births, encounters with pirates at sea—these and other unforeseen “accidents” at the turn of the seventeenth century in England acquired unprecedented significance in the early modern philosophical and cultural imagination. Drawing on intellectual history, cultural criticism, and rhetorical theory, this book chronicles the narrative transformation of “accident” from a philosophical dead end to an astonishing occasion for revelation and wonder in early modern religious life, dramatic practice, and experimental philosophy. Embracing the notion that accident was a concept with both learned and popular appeal, the book traces its evolution through Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Calvinist thought into a range of early modern texts. It suggests that for many English writers, accidental events raised fundamental questions about the nature of order in the world and the way that order should be apprehended. Alongside texts by such canonical figures as Shakespeare and Bacon, this study draws on several lesser-known authors of sensational news accounts about accidents that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The result is a cultural anatomy of accidents as philosophical problem, theatrical conceit, spiritual landmark, and even a prototype for Baconian “experiment,” one that provides a fresh interpretation of the early modern engagement with contingency in intellectual and cultural terms.

Early modern women's engagement with verse was predicated upon their command of literary form, yet formalist approaches to women's writing remain sporadic and undertheorized. This article argues that we need to think more imaginatively about formal composition if we are to better understand the work of early modern women as writers and readers, both in print and manuscript. Indeed, rhetorical ornament and display—foundational to Renaissance writing on formal composition—were key to the construction of women's literary capital in the period. This article considers that construction of literary capital across Renaissance literary criticism directed at women; women's writing in manuscript; Katherine Philips's commentary upon the writing process and the response of “Philo-Philippa” to her work; contemporary praise for women's writing, and the emergence of a female literary tradition. Further, an expansive understanding of rhetorical display allows us to experiment with more far-reaching analyses of women's engagement with manuscript culture, particularly its dialogic nature. By attending to early modern literary modes with more sensitivity, we may begin to rethink the dimensions of women's literary history.

It is hard for us to think through a world which lacks ether, chloroform, and aspirin, much less the elaborate pharmacopoeia we now possess for treating pain. The significant cultural productions of early modern Europe were deeply invested in the cultivation and articulation of pain. For Michel de Montaigne, the uses of corporeal adversity are truly sweet; Montaigne in fact finds an exhilarating pleasure in the health incumbent on the cessation of excruciating pain. If God is imagined to be the source of all our pain and woe in the Judeo-Christian dispensation, he will also be the agent of its amelioration at the end of time. This chapter discusses the sporadic early modern engagements with pain management to try to think about pain untainted by the meretricious and distorting discourses of sadism, masochism, and sanctification. Keywords:aesthetics; anesthetics; early modern Europe; England; Michel de Montaigne; pain management; sanctification

A hitherto unidentified early modern inscription in an illuminated Anglo-Norman Apocalypse manuscript owned by the Wormsley Estate (Buckinghamshire) is here demonstrated to be a stanza from “Content and Rich,” a moralizing lyric written by the Jesuit priest and martyr Robert Southwell (ca. 1561–95). In three parts, this essay explores the nature of solitude as prompted by this happy placement of Southwell’s lines praising conscience within a medieval French metrical translation of the Book of Revelation. The first part considers how the medieval manuscript glosses the Renaissance poem, proposing that the eschatological setting changes the seemingly anodyne “Content and Rich” into a charged justification for the controversial defense strategy known as equivocation. The second part, inspired by the Wormsley manuscript’s evidence of early modern engagement with medieval books, investigates Southwell’s reading of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) while awaiting execution. The final section reverses the relationship outlined in the first, using the early modern annotation to explicate the medieval Apocalypse manuscript. Southwell’s verses celebrating inner tranquility challenge readers to imagine if there may be such a condition as eschatological solitude. All three of these meditations on finding Southwell in the Apocalypse underscore the profound paradox that contented solitude is not solitary.

This book assesses the everyday use of petitions in administrative and judicial settings and contrasts these with more assertive forms of political petitioning addressed to assemblies or rulers. A petition used to be a humble means of asking a favour, but in the early modern period, petitioning became more assertive and participative. This book shows how this contrasted to ordinary petitioning, often to the consternation of authorities. By evaluating petitioning practices in Scotland, England and Denmark, the book traces the boundaries between ordinary and adversarial petitioning and shows how non-elites could become involved in politics through petitioning. Also observed are the responses of authorities to participative petitions, including the suppression or forgetting of unwelcome petitions and consequent struggles to establish petitioning as a right rather than a privilege. Together the chapters in this book indicate the significance of collective petitioning in articulating early modern public opinion and shaping contemporary ideas about opinion at large. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation.

ABSTRACTArchaeological data provide a critical perspective on the emergent relationships between Melanesians and Europeans during the mid-nineteenth century. Particularly important to the discussion are the native landscapes within which Europeans settled. As part of a larger exploration of early missionary settlement in southern Vanuatu, archaeologists working closely with local fieldworkers surveyed the native villages at Kwaraka and Anuikaraka, south Tanna Island. These archaeological settlements are notable for their well-preserved stone architecture, rare on Tanna, and their association with local oral traditions concerning inter-island exchange and early Melanesian engagements with Christianity. Archaeological research at Kwaraka has begun to explore the long-term settlement dynamics of these sites, as initial excavations have indicated features dating from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century. While direct evidence of nineteenth-century habitation was limited, preliminary results suggest European goods were rare at these sites, while also revealing information about more prominent local exchange networks that persisted through the colonial era. Archaeological approaches that span precolonial and colonial periods can challenge orthodox models for the emergence of modernity, while also providing important long-term perspectives on local historical trajectories.

Prophecy and millennial speculation are often seen as having played a key role in early European engagements with the new world, from Columbus’s use of the predictions of Joachim of Fiore, to the puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness’. Yet examinations of such ideas have sometimes presumed an overly simplistic application of these beliefs in the lives of those who held to them. This book explores the way in which prophecy and eschatological ideas influenced poets, politicians, theologians, and ordinary people in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Chapters cover topics ranging from messianic claimants to the Portuguese crown to popular prophetic almanacs in eighteenth-century New England; from eschatological ideas in the poetry of George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, to the prophetic speculation surrounding the Evangelical revivals. It highlights the ways in which prophecy and eschatology played a key role in the early modern Atlantic world.

One of the earliest examples of a sociological analysis of literature in a comparative perspective, the essay by Haraprasad Shastri is conceived within the central paradigm at work in literature and literary theory of the time – the usefulness of literature and, in this case, the contemporary role of literature in moulding the character of the country’s youth. A humorous, playful tone often leads the reader to accept certain viewpoints regarding the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as well as many of the popular authors of old and modern Western and Indian literature. The emerging authors in the context of the essay are Kālidasa, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and Byron, each engaging with love, the description of nature, and the idea of happiness, even if obliquely. In each case, the connotations of the three central motifs are different, and the writers achieve their effect by different means. Each author’s work is analysed with reference to his social situation, and one of the conclusions is that Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay wrote to evoke patriotism and bring in social happiness, Kālidāsa wrote to incite love for all living beings and for social happiness while Byron wrote for humanitarian reasons and showed how one could be happy by transgressing social norms. The concomitant question of desire that comes up in the essay is an early modern engagement with the issue in Bangla literary theory.