Seventeenth-Century English Literature Research Articles

Janel Mueller, 1938–2022

Previous articleNext article FreeObituaryJanel Mueller, 1938–2022Joshua ScodelJoshua ScodelHelen A. Regenstein Professor of English, University of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointI am deeply honored to pay tribute to Janel Mueller, who died on October 21, 2022. From 1988 to 1998 Janel edited Modern Philology with a characteristic blend of broad vision and incisive attention to detail. As a journal editor, award-winning teacher, and inspiring mentor of younger scholars, Janel energetically advanced literary scholarship by nurturing and improving the work of others. I gratefully remember many drafts of my own work in progress laden with her acute blue-penciled suggestions.The fitting coeditor of the 2002 Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, Janel was a magnificent scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. She combined immense erudition, particularly in the history of Christian thought; passionate dedication to expanding our literary canon by revealing the expressive power of underestimated early modern women authors and religious writings; and bold yet historically contextualized accounts of what made individual authors and texts new in style, argument, and vision. With rigorous stylistics grounded in linguistics, Janel’s Native Tongue and the Word (1984) traced with revisionary vigor how Protestant scripturalism and the imitation of biblical parallelism shaped early modern English prose, which had previously been analyzed in relation to classical models or modern science.Throughout her career Janel focused with piercing intensity on two major male authors, Donne and Milton. Attentive to Donne’s sources but above all to his ever-surprising imagination, Janel published as her first book an edition of Donne’s prebend sermons (1971) and as her last an Oxford selection of his oeuvre (2018). Janel was at the forefront of scholarship exploring early modern constructions of gender, and her numerous publications on Donne include her learned, brilliant, and influential 1992 article articulating Donne’s lesbian utopianism in “Sapho to Philaenis.” Her many articles on Milton included important 1980s and 1990s analyses of his reinvention of the political sonnet and of his first prose tract’s radical reformulation of English apocalypticism and vanguard articulation, well before other scholars had recognized it, of a “nascent English republicanism.”In numerous editions and articles, Janel examined how early modern English women authors found their literary voices by engaging with scripture and with traditions previously defined by men. Her 1994 article elucidating the way that Aemilia Lanyer’s 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum reimagined Christ’s crucifixion in gendered terms was characteristically revelatory. Having coedited Elizabeth I’s writings and translations (2000–2009), in 2011 Janel published her magisterial edition of the writings of Elizabeth’s stepmother Katherine Parr, the first Englishwoman to publish a work of her own under her own name. Janel’s luminous introductions and copious notes revealed precisely how and why Parr produced a distinctive feminine vision of reformed spiritual devotion. Her praise of Parr’s “richly expressive legacy” might fittingly be applied to Janel’s own scholarship, the enduring expression of an unforgettable mind. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723649 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reason in Seventeenth-Century Millenarian England: The Example of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Milton’s England experiences military conflict, sociopolitical change, religious reform, and scientific progress. Seeking stability in a world of uncertainty, a substantial part of seventeenth-century English literature expresses millennial expectations, faith in the birth of a new and better humanity. Paradise Lost is a millenarian work that advocates humanity’s perfection through the proper use of reason. The latter has as prerequisite man’s self-knowledge—within a philosophical context—and union with God, Who is the supreme reason (Logos), within a religious context. Specifically, this article discusses Milton’s definition of human reason and its implications for humanity’s perception of reality/truth, through the examination of specific imageries reflecting four different levels of human reason in a hierarchical order: the lowest/first level, the low/second level, the high/third level, and the highest/fourth level. Imageries of sterility, erotic pervasion, ugliness, restrainment, concealment, sorrow, and power relationships mirror human reason in the first and second levels. Human reason in the first and second levels is corrupt and inadequate to perceive reality because it is based on the physical senses (natural reason). In contrast, imageries of fertility, erotic innocence, beauty, excess, revelation, bliss, and love relationships reflect human reason in the third and fourth levels. In the third and fourth levels, human reason incorporates love and creative imagination beyond the senses to endow humanity with a deep and comprehensive understanding of reality. The discussion of Milton’s imageries of human reason and its redemptive function for humanity is mainly built on Christian philosophy.

Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison A. Chapman

Reviewed by: Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison A. Chapman Brandon Taylor Alison A. Chapman, Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 216 pp. Alison Chapman's thoughtful and probing new book, Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries, builds on her earlier work on Milton's legal thinking by adding more detail and nuance to his understanding of how seventeenth-century England's patchwork of legal systems worked. Where her Legal Epic (2017) deploys the law to explore Milton's theodicy in Paradise Lost, this new work turns its critical eye toward some of Milton's prose to explore the way in which scholars have often overlooked English legal jurisdictions in their attempt to piece together Milton's sometimes paradoxical thinking. Over and again, Chapman's book highlights how the slow march of history compresses complex topics into two-dimensional constructs, commonly occluding the strangely imperfect but interconnected webs contemporary writers often felt them to be. Seventeenth-century England's legal system represents a conceptual labyrinth for modern readers and, as Chapman argues in the first chapter, Milton presents an unusually helpful case study because "more than any other major figure of the seventeenth century, he thought a lot about questions of jurisdiction, about the boundary lines that divided different spheres of influence and collections of legal norms" (4). In this, Chapman presents Milton's polemical prose as a sophisticated Rosetta stone or conceptual lodestar for scholars attempting to parse the complexities of seventeenth-century England's legal system, a system in transition from a functional but profoundly confusing patchwork into today's more obviously coherent system. To clarify these concepts, the preface provides thorough definitions for some of the key terms found throughout the book. Chapman outlines the nuanced distinctions between Roman law, canon law, and civil law. A notion that the book returns to repeatedly is that modern readers tend to view the law as a monolithic and unified construction and read that backward into the writings of Milton and his contemporaries. What Chapman proves is that reading seventeenth-century English literature without a clear sense of how the many presiding legal systems interacted needs to be reassessed, particularly with writers of the era who were deeply ensconced in the legal world, as Milton was. The finest example of Chapman's approach is demonstrated in the third chapter, which covers Areopagitica and its seemingly paradoxical defense of free speech, where in one breath Milton is the champion for unlicensed printing and in the next is saying some texts should be burned and thrown into the sea. The crucial insight Chapman unearths is that Milton's curious circumlocutions are not due to any ideological inconsistency but instead to a concern about the impact of libel, [End Page 229] particularly as printed polemics became more common. The concern Milton demonstrates is moral, where a descent into libelous treatises circumvents the very purpose of this public discourse, which is to focus on ideas, concepts, and the betterment of England. The stability of Milton's ideal where everyone is arguing and learning through public discourse is obviously undermined by the specter of petty libel, which helps round out the contours of Chapman's argument. As she claims, "if we think of libels only as forms of political critique, we are not in a position to understand Areopagitica" (54). Milton's typical conceptual dexterity is met in kind by Chapman in the book's fourth chapter that explores the divorce tracts, civil law, and the notion of equity, which the preface clarifies has two specific meanings in England's seventeenth-century contexts. One definition "could mean the specific approaches and remedies available only to judges in courts of equitable jurisdiction" and the other definition "could also refer to those broad ideas of fairness and justice that were shared by all legal systems" (xvi). The distinction may seem minor at first, but the fourth chapter highlights how Milton's capacious sensibilities help distinguish the subtle differences between the two forms of equity, especially in relation to Roman or civil law. This reasoning comes to the...

“A Foe to All Christians”: The Notorious English Corsair Captain and Ottoman Reis John Ward in Early Seventeenth Century English Literature

Privateering, which permitted private ships to attack enemy vessels and claim their prize (ship, goods, crew etc.) was only possible under a licence commissioned by a sovereign, better known as a ‘letter of marque’. In the Elizabethan Period (1558-1603), English privateering proved to be an effective way of dealing with Catholic Spain, especially during the Spanish War (1585-1603). When King James I ended the war with Spain in 1604, however, privateers such as John Ward –left without valid licenses permitting them to capture enemy merchant ships and confiscate their goods– had to find other means of support. Under these new circumstances, the former privateer Captain John Ward, also known as Jack Ward, first became pirate, then a Barbary corsair (Yusuf Reis) and Muslim operating from Tunis. This study deals with the representation of John Ward, someone who has excited the interest of audiences across England as well as being vilified by King James I, in early seventeenth century English literature. In this respect, literary texts that allude to John Ward such as broadsheet ballads, Samuel Rowlands’ poems, and Robert Daborne’s play A Christian turn’d Turke (1610-1612) will be examined with special reference to two pamphlets, Andrew Barker’s A true and certaine report of the beginning, proceedings, overthrowes, and now present estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker (1609) and the anonymous Newes from Sea, of Two Notorious Pirates Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman (1609).

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHannah August is a lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. She undertook her postgraduate study at King's College London, where she specialized in the reception of early modern drama in print and performance. Her work on this topic has appeared in the collection The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (Manchester University Press, 2015); she is also preparing a chapter for the forthcoming collection Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (Arden Shakespeare Intersections, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph on the history of reading commercial drama in quarto, entitled Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England.Jane Hwang Degenhardt is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, constructions of the “human,” and the intersecting histories of race and religion. She is completing a book that explores new understandings of “fortune” that developed in relation to early modern English global expansion. She is also working on a collaborative book project with Henry Turner that explores pluralistic understandings of the concept of “world” in Shakespeare’s plays as a means to imagining alternatives to globalization and an anthropocentric future.Alexander Paulsson Lash is assistant professor at National Taiwan University. His current book project, Theater Worlds: Staging Global London, 1576–1688, shows how early modern theaters shaped the spatial perceptions of playgoers, capturing their experience of disorientation and excitement as London expanded into a global city.Jane Rickard is an associate professor in seventeenth-century English literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, 2007), and coeditor (with Martin Butler) of Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph on Ben Jonson and his early readers.Lauren Robertson is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is currently completing her first book, Entertaining Uncertainty: The Phenomenology of the Early Modern English Commercial Theater. In it, she argues that the theater actively cultivated experiences of ambiguity and confusion for its spectators, transforming the period's multifarious cultural confrontations with doubt into deeply satisfactory objects of attention.Suzanne Tartamella is associate professor of English at Henderson State University, where she teaches courses in Renaissance and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays (Duquesne University Press, 2014), as well as articles appearing in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Her recent projects include a comparative essay on silent women in Jonson and Shakespeare and a monograph on Christian self-identity and the aesthetics of foreignness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 48, Number 1Spring 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709974 Views: 172 © 2020 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...

Contextualizing Anne Bradstreet’s Literary Remains: Why We Need a New Edition of the Poems

Contextualizing Anne Bradstreet’s Literary RemainsWhy We Need a New Edition of the Poems Margaret Olofson Thickstun (bio) Over the past thirty years, historians of the book have developed a rich and nuanced understanding of what it meant to write poetry in the early modern period and of the interplay between manuscript circulation and print production. Feminist scholars have reconstructed our understanding of women’s education during this period and recovered works by hundreds of women—from aristocrats writing Petrarchan sonnets to the wives of tradesmen publishing religious prophecies. Many scholars have become interested in the literary culture of the British Atlantic expansion. Some of these scholars of early modern England have done very good work specifically about Anne Bradstreet, placing her poetry in relation to texts by other early modern Englishwomen.1 Some Americanists have published chapters or articles that place Bradstreet in relation to particular facets of English or international literary culture: Philip Round, Tamara Harvey, Christopher Ivic, and Robert Hilliker. I am not discounting their contributions. But there continues to be very little conversation across the figurative Atlantic between the fields of seventeenth-century English and colonial American literature. Why does that matter? Because Anne Bradstreet was an early modern English woman participating in a literary culture about which we now know quite a lot, a culture in which people wrote poems to demonstrate their social status and to explore their intellectual interests, in which those poems circulated in manuscripts that were not at all “private” in the way that we understand that term today, and in which “professional” status and print publication were not the sine qua non of authorial achievement.2 The Harvard edition of her poems (Hensley), which monopolizes the teaching market as the only currently available edition and which remains the edition most frequently cited in the scholarship by an overwhelming margin, [End Page 389] not only presents an antiquated understanding of Bradstreet’s life and artistic activity but completely misrepresents what poems appeared in print when. Because the 1867 edition by John Harvard Ellis similarly misrepresents Bradstreet’s work, scholars who have not been following developments in book history and early modern women’s writing not only perpetuate misinformation but also make embarrassing mistakes. By placing Bradstreet’s art and accomplishments in the context of seventeenth-century women’s education, literary activity, and circulation practices, we gain a clearer sense of the role literary activity played in her life and a more accurate sense of her interests, aims, and accomplishments as a writer. anne bradstreet’s life and education in context Anne Bradstreet was a privileged Englishwoman who was transplanted in her late teens to Massachusetts and spent the rest of her life outside England. Both her father and her husband were Cambridge-educated men who worked, while in England, as stewards to the aristocracy: her father, Thomas Dudley, ran the estates of Theophilus Fiennes-Clinton, the fourth Earl of Lincoln; her husband, Simon Bradstreet, began in that household and then worked for the dowager Countess of Warwick. In Massachusetts Bay, both Bradstreet’s father and her husband served regularly in colonial government, and each was selected several times to serve as governor. As one editorial team comments, “Thomas Dudley, Simon Bradstreet, John Winthrop, and their comrades had moved in the higher economic and social circles of England; they had learned about success by being a part of the class that ran the country” (McElrath and Robb xix). Massachusetts Bay Colony was the project of an elite and highly educated group of Englishmen with a serious religious and political agenda aimed at reforming the English church. The Earl of Lincoln was one backer of the Massachusetts Bay experiment; the Dudley-Bradstreet clan traveled to the New World with the earl’s sister Arbella, after whom their ship was named;3 Bradstreet’s father corresponded with the young countess Bridget Fiennes-Clinton. Anne Bradstreet was part, in other words, of the service class to the elite and lived among the elite, both in England and in Massachusetts Bay.4 Scholars of early modern women’s writings have, in the past thirty years, done considerable research about the education and intellectual and artistic...

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Rachel Trubowitz

Reviewed by: Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Rachel Trubowitz Lauren Shook (bio) Keywords maternal body, Breastfeeding, English nation, modernity, Milton, Judeo-Christian relations, Seventeenth century Rachel Trubowitz. Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 251 pages. $115.00. “The breast replaces the pen as the authorial implement of choice” for the seventeenth-century English nation, argues Rachel Trubowitz in Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (26), citing the breast as the origin of the new modern nation and its components: the new spiritual mother, the reformed English subject, the Stuart political debate over the nation’s name, and the reformed nation. Trubowitz presents the reader with a diverse array of literary, extra-literary, and visual texts to support this argument. Literary works include Macbeth and popular querelle des femmes texts (ch. 2); political writings of James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton (ch. 3); Paradise Lost and Mary Cary’s and Anna Trapnel’s prophesies (ch. 4); and Samson Agonistes (ch. 5). The extra-literary include domestic guidebooks by Robert Cleaver and John Dod, William Gouge, Robert Pricke, and Elizabeth Clinton. Finally, visual culture takes a prominent place in Trubowitz’s book, including Renaissance portraits of the lactating Virgin Mary, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte (ca . 1330s), and frontispieces of English print culture, such as Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612) and Richard Braithwaite’s The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman (1641). This impressive, yet admittedly “ambitious scope,” successfully demonstrates the pervasiveness of the [End Page 149] nurturing mother in seventeenth-century debates regarding the English nation (33). For Trubowitz, the emergent English modern nation of the seventeenth century signals a different relationship among English subjects. Rather than being defined by rank, class, or bloodline, the modern English subject is defined in abstract, spiritual (“reformed”) terms. The modern nation is a reformed nation but is also Janus-faced and paradoxical, consisting of warring parties and ideologies: it is both royalist and reformist, dynastic and post-dynastic. And yet, the maternal breast is central to all. This modern nation, Trubowitz insists, begins at home where mothers were charged with the spiritual nurture of children. As Trubowitz shows in chapter 1, seventeenth-century England’s preoccupation with maternal breastfeeding, as opposed to wet-nursing, figured as a reformed interest among the emerging middle-class, one that would promote social bonds over bloodlines. What is so compelling about Trubowitz’s argument is that the language of maternal nurture was not just reserved for one particular type of English subject; rather reformists, proponents of an emerging middle-class, and royalist aristocrats all took up the rhetoric of the maternal breast. This is the primary argument of chapter 3, “Nursing Fathers and National Identity.” For instance, Trubowitz identifies James I’s political discourse surrounding the proposed unification between Scotland and England as a nurturing one that names both the Scottish and English as James’s children, figuring the king himself as the metaphorical mother. Likewise, Oliver Cromwell plays the nursing mother in his speeches aimed at solidifying the New Model Army and evokes “the language of nurturing motherhood to activate new affective forms of social attachment capable of overriding the bonds of blood and natural kinship that determined rank, status, title, and other customary forms of social distinction and stature in ‘the Kingdome old’” (126). Trubowitz is at her best when she highlights the ubiquitous nature of reformed motherhood and the nursing mother in both anti-Stuart and pro-Stuart rhetoric. What Trubowitz so convincingly proves is that social order nursed at the mother’s breast. The healthy futurity of England depended on the mother’s breast. Chapter 1, “Nursing Mothers and National Identity,” offers a sweeping examination of the visual and textual culture of the lactating breast and traces how reformist seventeenth-century domestic guidebooks by Dod and Cleaver, Gouge, and Clinton promote breastfeeding as a holy, spiritual necessity, which they argue should replace wet-nursing. The guidebooks present the Virgin [End Page 150] Mary’s holy breast as just one maternal breast among a typological, “scriptural line of exemplary, natural nursing mothers” which includes Jochobed...

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Anthony Welch The Renaissance Epic and the Oral PastThe Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past. Anthony Welch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. v+260.

<i>Anthony Welch</i> The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past<i>The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past</i>. Anthony Welch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. v+260.

Rachel Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Ce livre cherche a mettre en evidence les liens qui existent entre l’emergence de l’Etat moderne et le statut de la mere entre 1603 et 1675. L’association entre la mere nourriciere et la nation anglaise, celebree dans Richard II de Shakespeare comme « cette nourrice, cette matrice feconde en princes royaux » perdure et s’inflechit au xviie siecle. A partir de minutieuses analyses textuelles, developpees dans cinq chapitres et presentees dans une foisonnante introduction, Rachel Trubowitz mont...

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Rachel Trubowitz.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsNation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Rachel Trubowitz.Diane PurkissDiane Purkiss Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Volume 8Fall 2013 Published for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/EMW23617885 Views: 13Total views on this site ©2013 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State UniversityPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Nation and nurture in seventeenth-century English literature

Nation and nurture in seventeenth-century English literature

Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Erin Murphy

Reviewed by: Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Erin Murphy Carole Sargent Erin Murphy. Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Delaware, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 220. $65 (also e-book). When does an heir become monarch? Is lineage all, or does public opinion matter? If there can be, as philosopher-poet Mary Astell asserts, a rational (and for the era radical) moment before marriage to reconsider its viability and ponder alternatives, then does this imply there should be a similar moment before monarchy? Ms. Murphy charts how literary and political discourse lurched toward such a conclusion in the seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries. She studies Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell, along with assorted important women and men who consider the family-state analogy and genealogy. Laboring on respective sides of three bright historical lines—the execution of Charles I, the Exclusion Crisis, and the exile of James II—her study curates genealogical and typological disputes that characterize the era and alter our understanding of certain passages in Paradise Lost, Absalom and Achitophel, and other major works. Abutting family as a model of the state against the more genealogically literal principle of strict hereditary rule, [End Page 67] she claims the two cannot be separated, while still gamely (if somewhat knottily) teasing out interdependent differences. Deliberately blurring overly neat categories of Renaissance and Restoration, she considers how various public intellectuals attempted to stabilize their nation by exploring “both the promise and the dangers of marriage and reproduction” in an unsettled era when genealogies flourished with other textual representations of descent. The games begin with a public quarrel about genealogy, wherein formerly rigid Jacobean forms expand beyond mere patriarchal torch passing. Historian John Speed argues genealogy as destiny in 1592, while Jesuit priest Robert Parsons, whose work put him permanently on the outs with James I, challenges such claims in 1595. Ms. Murphy’s focus on Parsons is apt, and her analysis trenchant. However, Jesuits have often been characterized as intellectually adventurous and even iconoclastic compared to other Catholic priests, and I did want more about what his religious perspective, and later (perhaps by nuanced contrast) Dryden’s, may have meant in respect to genealogical assumptions. This book rewards patience, however, for her study will eventually weave together strands from these early conflicts, even if both pattern and payoff may initially be unclear. “A father and a king are very different things,” writes antiroyalist Milton in A Defence of the English People (1652), and Ms. Murphy uses Milton’s radical undermining of patriarchal and lineal arguments for monarchy as an opportunity to reconsider the “much-lamented flatness” of Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. Besides enlivening tepid bits in a masterpiece, Ms. Murphy’s text serves as a thoughtful prelude to a study of Comus, one of Milton’s “densest and most challenging works.” Her complex section on Milton bolsters a larger understanding that much of society’s genealogical wrangling was literary, grammatical, and verbal: a high-stakes conflict in print that presaged early eighteenth century pamphlet wars to come. Although Ms. Murphy considers poet Aemilia Lanyer’s pivotal introduction of mother and daughter to the “broad genealogical project,” her study becomes most fully gender-dimensional when turning to Lucy Hutchinson. This biographer and translator of Lucretius is also the attributed author of an anonymous 1679 devotional epic inspired by the Exclusion Crisis, Order and Disorder. Read with Paradise Lost in its background, and taken as a forerunner to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Order and Disorder highlights how the succession problem pointed to a much deeper societal rift. Hutchinson rethinks Genesis and Adam and Eve quite differently from Milton. She is torn between lineage, with the arbor as her preferred symbol of family, and her admiration of individual achievement. Her work honors marrying up, for as Ms. Murphy notes, “in a world where nobility is debauched and blood is spilled, [she] imagines marriage and God as parallel models of redemption.” Women become much more important to society as reproduction becomes a means to unify a nation, and not just spawn a lockstep line of kings. Ms. Murphy’s tour de force...

Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature Shannon Miller Murphy, Erin. Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. 308 pp. Erin Murphy’s Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature is an insightful addition to recent work on the relationship between the state and the family in the English Renaissance and Restoration period. To this rich topic, Murphy adds a focus onto the period’s “genealogical politics,” the deployment of the genealogical family line to argue for, and against, theories of monarchial authority (29). Centrally positioning the figure of the mother into discussions about the contested relationship of the family to the state, the book simultaneously explores the implicit temporality invoked by generational production. The first chapter, “The Jesuit, the King, and a Lady: Form and Jacobean Patriarchalism,” leads the reader through the writings of a less known political thinker, Robert Parsons, whose 1595 A Conference About the Next Succession was reprinted during the most contested seventeenth-century political crises. Framing a discussion of the importance of genealogy in Parsons with an effective summary of work on patriarchal thought, Murphy illustrates the disruption that actual families pose to theories of monarchical inheritance grounded on genealogy. The second part of the chapter considers Parsons’ views in light of James I’s writings on inheritance and government—including his difficult negotiation of his own mother Mary, Queen of Scots—and then Aemilia Lanyer’s portrayal of an alternative, female-based lineage in “The Description of Cookeham.” The seven chapters that follow illustrate how the “political temporality of the family” (34) becomes a central problem for patriarchal theory and literary texts throughout the seventeenth century. Murphy describes how “[s]ome texts would mobilize typology to shore up lineal right, while others would deploy it as an alternative to genealogy” (70), thus countering the lineal right upon which Filmerian-style patriarchalism depended. As Murphy moves from these Jacobean texts into three chapters on Milton, the book appears at times to be anexploration of the influence of Parsons’ thought, at others the exploration of a trope that Parsons deploys rather than introduces. When Familial [End Page 59] Forms is at its best, it engages this latter, much broader topic. The three Milton chapters engage the family politics of John Milton’s writing, offering a shorter chapter on the prose and two substantive chapters on Paradise Lost. This portion of the book effectively addresses the problem of Milton’s seeming use of the analogy of the family and state in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. By positioning his use of this analogy amidst a broader view of Milton’s treatment of genealogy and its political implications, Murphy traces the development of Milton’s theories on the family and state from “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” through Comus, and then into Paradise Lost: in his Restoration epic, the politics of reproduction and its connection to genealogical politics become significantly more focused. I find Murphy’s emphasis on the development of Milton’s thought particularly convincing at resolving the conundrum of a Republican seemingly relying on the family-state analogy in the 1640’s. By stressing the generational politics raised by the inheritance of the title of Protector from father (Oliver Cromwell) to son (Richard), as well as the moment of Charles’ restoration, Murphy offers rich, topical interpretations of key sequences of Paradise Lost. In Murphy’s reading of the Book 2 Sin and Death scene, which portrays reproduction as destructive and perverse, Milton “attacks royalist ideology [of genealogy] by attempting to expose the way. . .it literalizes metaphor” (93). In negating the genealogical argument, Milton effectively creates the domestic sphere and consequently dismisses the analogical argument at the heart of Filmerian thinking; the effect is to “preserve the health of the English nation” by separating it from the family (105). In Chapter 4 on Books 11–12 of Paradise Lost, Murphy emphasizes the disruption to the genealogical narrative as Eve is banned from Michael’s account of the history of man. The restoration of any genealogical line—one challenged by the choice of biblical stories recounted in Books...

Libertine and Libertinism: Polemic Uses of the Terms in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English and Scottish Literature

This essay analyzes the actual usage of the terms libertine and libertinism within the context of early modern English literature, investigating how the very idea of libertinism starts appearing from the sixteenth century onward and how the character of the libertine was imported from France to the British Isles in the course of the seventeenth century. This latter term starts to appear in the direct and often explicit context of Calvin's work against the "sect" of the "Libertines." However, a dual usage of the term seems to articulate itself rather quickly, as the analysis of two pamphlets published in 1646 reveals: the libertine is then both a member of one of the many so-called spiritualist "sects" contesting the Anglican church and Calvinism simultaneously, or he is a ruthless hedonist. Exactly this conception, which arose within the context of Calvinism and in which the "liberty of the flesh" was understood as a false liberty, unites the two distinct interpretations of the term. The terms libertine and libertines were always used in a polemical and defamatory mode. However, an informal group described as the "ranters" claimed this term while at the same time trying to redefine it.

NANCY ROSENFELD, The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: From Milton to Rochester.

NANCY ROSENFELD, The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: From Milton to Rochester.

"Show that thy brests can not be dry": Unsatisfied Longing in George Herbert's Nursing Mother and Child Imagery

"Show that thy brests can not be dry":Unsatisfied Longing in George Herbert's Nursing Mother and Child Imagery Jennifer A. Newton Unlike Richard Crashaw, whose poem "Blessed be the Paps which Thou hast sucked," referring to the nursing breasts of the Virgin Mary, is indicative of a tendency toward fleshly, and female, imagery, George Herbert is not typically associated with poetry dwelling on the flesh or the feminine - and certainly not with breastfeeding.1 Yet we do see a few references to feminine flesh and specifically nursing mother imagery scattered among Herbert's English and Latin poems.2 In Herbert's Memoriae Matris Sacrum 7, for instance, the speaker complains that the "bared breasts" of the ghost replacing his mother are "made of air to fool" him (l. 4).3 Similarly, the speaker in the Williams manuscript version of "Whitsunday" pleads with his Lord to "Show that thy brests can not be dry," but still provide "blessings" (11. 21, 23).4 Herbert in "Longing" again applies to God the imagery of infants receiving nourishment from their mothers - "they suck thee" (l. 17) - while in "To John, leaning on the Lord's breast," a Latin poem from Lucus, Herbert's speaker vies with the Apostle John to gain access to the breast of Christ.5 Even though the images are found in disparate poems, Herbert's nursing mother and child images are thematically related in that they are associated with no provision of nourishment. The development of feminist and New Historical approaches to texts in recent decades has resulted in an interest in maternal imagery, including breastfeeding. The imagery (such as the "nursing father" analogy of King James)6 has been explored in regards to the early modern political landscape in such works as Debora Kuller Shuger's Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance and Rachel Trubowitz's more recent Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature.7 Another popular approach to early modern breastfeeding imagery has been a psychoanalytical one, of which Robert N. Watson's Rest Is Silence is a prime example.8 As these and other scholars have pointed out, nursing mother analogies and a concern for the reality of breastfeeding infants can be seen in sermons, treatises, and other texts [End Page 34] of the period. When studies of the early modern period in England reference Herbert's use of nursing mother imagery (typically citing the stanza from "Longing"), it is as a conventional use of the image. However, an overview comparison of contemporary uses with each of Herbert's nursing images reveals a key difference. Whereas other texts in England's Christian tradition generally depict the true nursing mother figure (whether God or church leaders or actual birth mothers) as providing both nourishment and comfort for the Christian, congregation, or infant child, Herbert's metaphors depict the opposite: a maternal figure who does not provide and a child who therefore longs to be nourished and cherished. Non lacte: No Provision from an Unnatural Mother A striking instance of this nursing metaphor is Herbert's complaint regarding the deceptive "bared breasts made of air" belonging to an apparition that has replaced his mother in Memoriae Matris Sacrum 7. As Herbert addresses this "Pallid, bloodless semblance of a motherly Guardian Spirit" (l. 1), he accuses her of not providing the nourishment that he craves: & pro matre mihi phantasma dolosumVberáque aerea hiscentum fallentia natum?Vae nubi pluuiâ grauidae, non lacte, meásqueRidenti lacrymas quibus vnis concolor vnda est. (ll. 3-6) [And my mother replaced by a misleading chimeraAnd bared breasts made of air to fool, open-mouthed, a son?Hang you, cloud, laden with rain and no milk, andJeering my tears, with which your water shares merely the color.] In this vivid metaphor, instead of milk from her breasts, this counterfeit of Magdalene Herbert showers down a disappointing rain. Since breastfeeding is an intimate action shared solely by mother and child, through using this image, Herbert's grieving speaker reveals his longing for the nurturing intimacy he once enjoyed. [End Page 35] A popular approach to this poem, and others from Memoriae Matris Sacrum, has been to look through a...

The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: From Milton to Rochester (review)

The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: From Milton to Rochester (review)

Romance in Peril: A Survey of the Genre in Seventeenth Century English Literature

The seventeenth century in England can be seen as the age which marked the beginning of modernity as well as the beginning of empirical thought. Rationalization of viewpoints combined with the political turmoil of the century, causing immense setbacks within the English literary traditions. One of these setbacks took place within the romance tradition which had been a major mode of writing during the earlier centuries. In this sense, this article analyses reasons of the decline of the romance tradition throughout seventeenth century English literature as well as examining how the genre managed to survive either implicitly or explicitly in several works like Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, pastoral poems by Andrew Marvel and Milton, and in some parts of Milton’s Paradise Lost .