English Humanists Research Articles

John Shirwood and the reading of Plutarch's Lives in late fifteenth‐century England☆

AbstractIn the fifteenth century, Plutarch's Lives were popular among humanists for their moral and historical content. They circulated widely in humanist Latin translations in manuscript and later in print. This article examines the reading of printed copies of these translations in late fifteenth‐century England. It focuses on John Shirwood (d. 1493), Bishop of Durham, an avid English reader of humanist books. The article suggests that Shirwood's annotations to Plutarch should be interpreted as evidence of humanist reading in a recreational context. While modern studies on the history of reading classical texts have often emphasised Renaissance readers' structured, methodical approaches of annotation, Shirwood's copy of Plutarch's Lives reveals a clerk at leisure, enjoying humanist books outside of formal academic study. The article goes on to compare Shirwood's annotations of Plutarch's Lives with those of two other late fifteenth‐century English humanists: the similarly eclectic historical annotations of the bishop John Russell (d. 1494); and, as a counterpoint, the more structured moral and linguistic interests of the grammarian John Stanbridge (1463–1510). These three responses to the Latin translations of Plutarch's Lives thus indicate how educated individuals engaged with humanist texts at different levels of rigour, from methodical academic study to recreational enjoyment.

Thomas More and the Defence of the Religious Orders in Henry VIII's England

AbstractMuch has been written about Thomas More's alleged monastic vocation and spirituality, but rather less about his views on the religious orders of his day. This article argues that a consistent position towards contemporary English monasticism can be discerned across More's (highly varied) oeuvre and in his personal connections with religious houses. He was an enthusiastic supporter of strictly observant monasticism throughout his career, but seems to have looked much more critically upon other branches of the religious orders in early Tudor England (which comprised the large majority). This orientation was shared with some other English humanists, but clashed with the position of Erasmus who held no special regard for strictly observant monasteries. More's misgivings about general monastic standards in the realm held a wider significance, in view of his status as the most prolific and influential polemicist writing in support of the early Tudor church. The defence of the religious orders in the controversialist works that More wrote and oversaw in the later 1520s and early 1530s was distinctly lukewarm, and even at times evasive. Partly as a result, the mounting evangelical and anticlerical attacks on English monasteries in these years went largely unanswered.

Leviathan and the bagpipe: Hobbes and the poetics of figuration in the English revolution

ABSTRACTThough English humanists tended to emphasize the continuity between rhetoric and poetics, Thomas Hobbes confronted the tensions between those linguistic arts as they were practised in the early modern period. This essay argues that Hobbes’s reinvestment in rhetorical eloquence was accompanied by a renewed understanding of figurative expression’s uniquely poetic effects. Breaking from royalist writers who often insisted upon the literal truth of monarchical imagery, Hobbes adapted an approach to metaphor honed by parliamentarian polemicists in the English Revolution. In both his literary-critical epistle, the “Answer to Davenant”, and Leviathan, Hobbes used an awareness of language’s poetic dimensions to revise many of the master tropes of early modern discourse, deconstructing the epic invocation to the muse and fundamentally transforming the body politic. In the process, he demonstrated the power of poetic figuration as a philosophical instrument for collective knowledge.

Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549

In Unwritten Verities: The Making of England's Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549 , Sebastian Sobecki argues that the commitment by English common law to an unwritten tradition, along with its association with Lancastrian political ideas of consensual government, generated a vernacular legal culture on the eve of the Reformation that challenged the centralizing ambitions of Tudor monarchs, the scriptural literalism of ardent Protestants, and the Latinity of English humanists. Sobecki identifies the widespread dissemination of legal books and William Caxton's printing of the Statutes of Henry VII as crucial events in the creation of a vernacular legal culture. He reveals the impact of medieval concepts of language, governance, and unwritten authority on such sixteenth-century humanists, reformers, playwrights, and legal writers as John Rastell, Thomas Elyot, Christopher St. German, Edmund Dudley, John Heywood, and Thomas Starkey. Unwritten Verities argues that three significant developments contributed to the emergence of a vernacular legal culture in fifteenth-century England: medieval literary theories of translation, a Lancastrian legacy of conciliar government, and an adherence to unwritten tradition. This vernacular legal culture, in turn, challenged the textual practices of English humanism and the early Reformation in the following century. Ultimately, the spread of vernacular law books found a response in the popular rebellions of 1549, at the helm of which often stood petitioners trained in legal writing. Informed by new developments in medieval literature and early modern social history, Unwritten Verities sheds new light on law printing, John Fortescue's constitutional thought, ideas of the commonwealth, and the role of French in medieval and Tudor England.

DEREK WALCOTI'S OMEROS AND THE CLASSICS

The Greek classics served the Italian, French, and English humanists without the troublesome interposition of actual Greeks. Texts by dead people were read, appreciat~, and appropriated by people who imagined an ideal commonwealth ... In modem times, however, thinking about cultural exchange involves thinking about domination and forcible appropriation: someone loses, someone gains. (Edward Said 1994:235)

Benign and Benevolent Conquest?: The Ideology of Elizabethan Atlantic Expansion Revisited

This essay revisits the language of conquest in metropolitan writings advocating Elizabethan Atlantic expansion. It argues that contrary to the belligerent connotations scholars usually attach to the word conquest, in Elizabethan England it was a term used in a benign and benevolent manner that fit within humanist goals for a noble, peaceful, and long-term relationship with both the people and land of America. By the early seventeenth century, however, this idea of benign conquest was overshadowed by factors such as the example of Spanish conquest in the New World, which tainted the English benign usage, and the transition from theory in the Elizabethan age to practice under the early Stuarts, which showed that the American natives were not willing to accept English presence on the benevolent terms anticipated by English humanists. Another factor that led to the decline in the language of benign conquest was the formulation of the "conquest doctrine" in the law of nations, which gave the term an exclusively belligerent connotation. Owing to these various factors, by the time the permanent English empire in America was established, the idea of benign conquest no longer had a place in domestic, colonial, or supranational discourse.

Advising Monarchs and their Counsellors: Juan Luis Vives on the Emotions, Civil Life and International Relations

In a recent essay, Enrique Gonz lez Gonz lez points out that the writings of the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (Valencia, 1492/93? - Bruges, 1540) on rhetoric, philosophy, history, education, theology, and political thought enjoyed enormous success in the early modern period. After Erasmus, Vives was the most read humanist of the sixteenth century and yet, apart from his pedagogical tracts, his reputation had fallen into oblivion by the second half of the seventeenth century. As Gonz lez Gonz lez notes, '[h]is works were published much more than a thousand times, more than 250 times in France, slightly less in Germany, and they had an enormous diffusion in the presses of Italy, the Low Countries and England. They were printed, but much less frequently, in Spain.' Many were translated into vernacular languages between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. While some scholars have indicated Vives's importance for later authors, his legacy has been largely neglected in the English-speaking world. My aim in this essay is to cast further light on Vives's conception of the relationship of human nature and the emotions to peace and prosperity, international relations both within Western Europe, and between the Christian and Islamic worlds. At the centre of these conceptions rests the problem of monarchical rule, and its fundamental role in the conduct of war and peace. In a fallen Augustinian world, how does one ensure that the single repository of power and authority acts in the interests not only of the realm but also of the entire Christian commonwealth? Vives's intellectual world has much in common with that of Erasmus and the English humanists with whom he associated. While the classical and medieval sources Vives quarried, the generic forms he chose, and the content of his writings can be said to be familiar to students of Erasmus and early Tudor humanism, the fact that they were so widely disseminated and read demands that they be given greater attention than has previously been the case.

Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530. Daniel Wakelin . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+254.

<i>Daniel Wakelin,</i> Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530<i>Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530</i>. Daniel Wakelin . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+254.

Hobbes's Thucydides and the Colonial Law of Nations

This article attempts to make sense of Thomas Hobbes's 1628 translation of Thucydides, published as Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, in terms of seventeenth-century interest in and debates over the law of nations, or ius gentium. Its aim is to shift the scholarly focus on Hobbes's translation from its most often assumed context, that of royalism, to what I will argue is a more fitting context, that of the law of nations, and by extension, the intellectual history of international law. Among Hobbes scholars, the fact that the first publication to which Hobbes gave his name was a classical translation is often noted but rarely considered in much depth.1 For many years, orthodoxy held that Hobbes started his brilliant philosophical career with a humanistic period before he encountered the Euclidean geometry that would occasion his turn from humanism to 'political science' - a turn variously construed as virtue to vice or vice to virtue, depending on the critic. Recent scholarship has rightly questioned such narratives, noting for instance that Hobbes late in his life wrote a verse autobiography and an anticlerical poem in Latin and translated Homer from the Greek. The insistence that Hobbes's humanism persisted throughout his lifetime, however, does not fully account for the Thucydides translation: acknowledging Hobbes the humanist only spawns further questions. 2 Now that Hobbes's Thucydides translation is seen less and less as something from which Hobbes would later turn, questions of what sort of project was signalled by the Thucydides translation come to the fore. Recent work by Jeffrey Collins and Kinch Hoekstra, taking aim, on the one hand, at the story of Hobbes's purportedly consistent royalism, and, on the other, at Hobbes's supposed turn to de facto-ism in Leviathan (it turns out it was there all the time), has made interpreting Hobbes's intentions with the Thucydides volume all the more significant.3 In this vein, a number of diachronically conceived studies have linked Thucydides and Hobbes's later work, Leviathan in particular, yet they have often treated Hobbes's encounter with Thucydides as an inevitable communion of like political minds rather than as an encounter encouraged and surrounded by other texts and historical events.4 It remains an open question, in other words, why Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides in the first place. This article therefore takes a more synchronic approach and seeks to reconstruct the intellectual context in which Hobbes translated and then published his Thucydides, asking two interrelated questions: why Thucydides? And why 1628? Ultimately, I will argue, Hobbes's translation should be seen not just as a precursor to his later treatises but as part of broader attempt on the part of English humanists in the mid-1620s and early 1630s to make available to English readers the stories and exempla - the raw materials - necessary to underpin an ethical, English law of nations. Hobbes's Thucydides, it will be suggested, was vitally concerned with the law of nations and concerned particularly with the legal justifications and moral obligations of empire.In making such an argument, this article will develop in three stages. First, identifying some limitations of existing literature on the context for Hobbes's Thucydides translation, I will propose that Hobbes's Thucydides should be seen not solely in terms of domestic English politics, but in more global terms that, while encompassing domestic English politics, also resonate out into England's growing empire. This section will briefly discuss Parliamentary politics in 1627-28, not for its own sake but for the wider purpose of dislodging some prevailing assumptions about Hobbes's intentions with the Thucydides volume. I will then turn to two theorists of the ius gentium, Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, both of whose works could be found in the library Hobbes tended in the 1620s, to explore the unique demands the genre of the early modern Latin ius gentium tract made on ancient histories, which were seen to hold the potential to speak about the ius gentium by indicating the laws 'common to all known legal systems' and 'all known peoples. …

Érasme chez Richard Pynson (1513), imprimeur du Roi à Londres

The author studies the relationship between Erasmus and Richard Pynson, the printer of both the king and the English humanists. He first proposes a survey of the history of books in England, then describes the career of Pynson, a Norman who first worked in Rouen before settling in London in the 1490s – Pynson became English in 1513 – and who produced over five hundred books until his death in 1529. In 1513, Pynson published a princeps edition of Plutarch, translated by Erasmus: in fact a rewritten version of Libellus de constructione octo partium orationis by William Lily, the first “high master” of John Colet’s Saint Paul’s school.

Book Review: English Humanists: Padua and the Tudors. English Students in Italy, 1485–1603

Book Review: English Humanists: Padua and the Tudors. English Students in Italy, 1485–1603

Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340-1560 by Ben Lowe

BOOK REVIEWS455 this issue within the Western Church were also factors of profound relevance for the development of the papal monarchy in the early fourteenth century. J. H. Denton University ofManchester Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340-1560. By Ben Lowe. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 362. $60.00 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) Ben Lowe's work is a welcome addition to the scholarly analysis of peace movements and ideas in Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. There are many things to like about this book. Over the past generation we have seen "peace studies" pass from a marginal endeavor—dismissed by many historians as special pleading and misreading of the evidence—into a highly developed field of study, albeit still one incorporated into far too few history departments' offerings and too few surveys' pages. Acceptance of the facts still remains hardwon ; and while not even the most devoted peace-studies scholar would question the realities of war in any minimally acceptable introductory text, many historians still raise eyebrows when the reality of peacemaking and peace discourse (to borrow Lowe's phrase) is documented by serious scholars. Lowe's work builds on much previous research to focus on English ideas from the start of the Hundred Years' War in 1337 to the Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis in 1559 and does much to bring a living tradition of thinking and writing about peace to a contemporary audience who might not have considered the possibility before . The book is the outcome of research Lowe completed for a doctoral dissertation , and he has also published several articles on war and peace in the Elizabethan period. Imagining Peace offers introductory chapters on the just-war "ideology" and the development of the law of arms in the later Middle Ages, and then surveys "anti-war" and "peace" discourse during the Hundred Years' War and the ideas on war and peace of the English Humanists, material earlier covered in such works as Robert P. Adams's "groundbreaking" The Better Part of Valor (1962). Lowe goes on to discuss early Protestant "negotiations" of war and peace, and concludes by examining these issues in the Elizabethan period. The author contends that while the just-war theory remained die dominant —one sometimes gets the impression from this book, the only legitimate— Christian approach to war and peace in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, toward the end of the Hundred Years' War sufficient opposition had formed among many elements of English society to allow the fruitful development of an intellectual tradition that began to reject just-war thinking as an appropriate Christian response. Lowe assembles and weighs enough evidence to argue his case convincingly that by the time Humanism reached England the way had 456BOOK REVIEWS been well prepared for the efforts of the London Reformers and their Renaissance critique of war. The Humanists, in turn, paved the way for the English Protestants and their ideas of peace based on "biblical exegesis." The book includes an English "Complaint of Peace" in an appendix and a good bibliography. Lowe draws on a variety of sources: sermons and liturgies, episcopal visitations and inquisitions, public and private correspondence, state papers, registers, chronicles, literary texts, explicit treatises on war and peace and a wide-ranging command of the secondary literature to place his study and his judgments upon sound scholarly footing. There are some things to question from a methodological and conceptual point of view that do not diminish the value of Lowe's work but that highlight both the limitations and the thought-provoking aspects of his approach. Lowe accepts a traditional framework of organizing and conceptualizing the history of peace ideas and "movements" within the context of war: one begins with some passing references to Augustine and the Early Church; enters the categories of the "just-war" tradition, an approach recently given ironclad formulation by James T. Johnson; and then proceeds to the discussion at hand employing these critical categories. While there was a continuing tradition of Gospel peacemaking in the image of the HeavenlyJerusalem (and all the apocalyptic and popular peace movements that this image spawned); of peace as justice...

The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism

Scholarly representations of the rise of humanism in Northern European universities during the sixteenth century have been under some strain since James Overfield's 1982 study, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany, which successfully critiqued earlier positivist narratives through a detailed examination of continental European experience. Students of sixteenth-century England have, by contrast, remained remarkably consistent in arguing that English humanists took over the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the reign of Henry VIII, and while they did not eliminate the backward scholastics, they had considerable success in making them appear ridiculous. English historiography follows the rhetoric of its sources: humanism is presented as the dawn of the New Age-an intellectual, scholarly achievement. This paper challenges such orthodox representation by examining reactions to the founding of three humanist lectureships at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1518.

Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England

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.

Imitation pedagogy and ethical indoctrination

Sixteenth-century English humanist educators claimed that their educational programs prepared students for civic life by providing not just technical training in language use, but a more important ethical and moral training. The present discussion is to examine this claim, particularly as it applies to the question of what might have been the role of imitation exercises informing students' ethical character. When one considers imitation pedagogy in the general context of humanist education and in the particular context of the reading method prescribed by Erasmus, one finds that such exercises served not only as means by which student writers might assimilate the characteristic style and habits of thinking of the models they choose, but, in fact, such exercises were tools for students' ethical indoctrination. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine question whether humanist educators actually could have made good their claim to provide moral training or preparation for civic life (122). Examining the evidence available for the practices of humanist teachers, Grafton and Jardine contend that humanist education at its best was little more than training in Latin language skills. In support of their contention, Grafton and Jardine discuss the early fifteenth-century teaching practices of Guarino Guarini of Verona and the lectures of later Roman and Florentine rhetoricians, such as Buonaccorso Massari. By examining students' notes from such lectures, Grafton and Jardine conclude that the approach of these humanists to the classical texts was so unstructured and fraught with philological detail that students could not have been prepared by such education to confront larger questions concerning the attitudes and beliefs [which inform an entire text] either to endorse them, or to challenge them (58-67). To consider Grafton and Jardine's question as it applies to sixteenth-century English humanist educators' use of imitation pedagogy, one must first recall how the political conditions and religious strife of the English Renaissance affected the sort of education the English humanists advocated. Political and religious indoctrination became important aspects of sixteenth-century English humanist education even while such education retained the characteristic rhetorical nature of earlier Renaissance humanist education. According to William Bouwsma, early Renaissance Italian humanism was characterized by an emphasis on rhetoric, a cultural relativism, and an intellectual rejection of older conceptions of order, or cosmos. But northern European Renaissance culture of 1450 onwards was characteristically inclined to reassert intellectual order and authority as political, religious, and cultural forces of order (particularly the monarchies and the papacy) reasserted their power (422-431). In England, the Tudor monarchy began to assert first its political authority and later, with Henry VIII's break with Rome, its religious authority. Grafton and Jardine explain that at the same time it was left for northern European humanist educators, particularly Erasmus, to make humanism practicable in the classroom, to change philological method into pedagogical method. Fifteenth-century Italian humanists at Rome and Florence had lectured brilliantly, elucidating by philological method obscure classical texts

Tudor Prose Style: English Humanists and the Problem of a Standard

Tudor Prose Style: English Humanists and the Problem of a Standard

Humanistic script in a monastic register: an outward and visible sign?

Learning to write the new humanistic script can surely be taken as a sign of humanistic interests’ in the fifteenth century. This is the conclusion of the compilers of a catalogue entitled Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century which was produced in conjunction with an exhibition held in the Bodleian library, Oxford in 1970. As long as our interests are confined to the small circle of English humanists in this period who are known by name this statement may not lead us on to reflection or comment since its truth is self-evident. The situation is altered, however, and the words quoted above assume a new meaning and suggest a new line of approach in the light of an unexpected encounter with anonymous attempts to imitate the script in the unusual setting of a monastic letter–book or register.

The Prosopography of the Tudor University

The Prosopography of the Tudor University The social composition and role of the English universities in the sixteenth century has been the object of growing scholarly interest for over a generation. It is probably just to trace this development to two essays written by Hexter over twenty years ago.I In the first of these, on the education of the aristocracy in England, France, and the Netherlands, he stated the view that is most immediately relevant to the present discussion. The landed classes of northern Europe adapted to the challenge offered by the new monarchs by responding to humanistic criticism of their ignorance and barbarism and by pursuing formal education in schools and universities for the first time in large numbers, not so much for the service of a princely court as for the service of the commonwealth. In I970, Kearney advanced a number of new hypotheses about the response of the Tudor university to the social changes of sixteenth-century England. Among his hypotheses is the view that between 1500 and I600, the universities were transformed from being institutions geared to training for a particular profession into institutions which acted as instruments of social control. 2 It is clear from this and many of Kearney's challenging theses that we are about to develop refined theories about Tudor Oxford and Cambridge. It is important, therefore, to look closely at the work that has been done, to decide what it is that we do know, and to suggest how we may best proceed from here. The results of such an inquiry are not altogether reassuring, although Hexter's general thesis has never been seriously challenged. It is commonly agreed that the English humanists successfully domesticated the notion that the aristocracy should be retrained for service in the state, that this ideal was generally adopted by the propertied classes, and that

Reviews

Margaret Mann Phillips, The 'Adages of Erasmus: A Study with Translations, reviewed by D.F.S. Thomson Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus on His Times, reviewed by D.F.S. Thomson James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VII and Edward VI, reviewed by D.F.S. Thomson Craig R. Thompson, trans., The Coloquies of Erasmus, reviewed by D.F.S. Thomson Jacqueline de Romilly, Time in Greek Tragedy, reviewed by D.J. Conacher James Sutheroand, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, Bertrand Harris Bronson, Facets of the Enlightenment, and R.F. Brissenden, Studies in Eighteenth Century: Papers presented at the David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar Canberra 1966, reviewed by D.I.B. Smith

Katherine Parr: the Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen

Among the wives of Henry VIII, only his first and last, Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Parr, possessed both the education and the intelligence to exemplify the Renaissance ideal for a woman born to gentle life. Both Katherines took their religion seriously, and in spite of the papal loyalties of the one and the Protestant proclivities of the other, they belonged to the same tradition of Renaissance religion which J. K. McConica has most recently traced in his study of English humanists. If Katherine of Aragon far surpassed her English namesake by the thoroughness of her education in the Spanish humanism of Isabella's court, Katherine Parr actually wrote and had published two books which proved surprisingly popular. If the breadth of the first Katherine's patronage of Renaissance writers was far more extensive than that of the second, the patronage of the second was more closely related to the course of English religion and politics.A few years ago Conyers Read wrote that Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner merited more attention than it had received, and the comment could be justly extended to the Queen's religious convictions in general.