- prof emeritus UNC-CH; prof U of richmondedit
Both Machiavelli and Shakespeare were drawn to Livy\u27s and Plutarch\u27s stories of the legendary field commander turned political inept, Caius Martius, who was honored with the name Coriolanus after sacking the city of Corioles. The... more
Both Machiavelli and Shakespeare were drawn to Livy\u27s and Plutarch\u27s stories of the legendary field commander turned political inept, Caius Martius, who was honored with the name Coriolanus after sacking the city of Corioles. The sixteenth-century ‘coriolanists’ are usually paired as advocates of participatory regimes and said to have used Coriolanus\u27s virulent opposition to power-sharing in early republican Rome as an occasion to put plebeian interests in a favorable light. This article objects to that characterization, distinguishing Machiavelli\u27s deployment of Coriolanus in his Principe and Discorsi from Shakespeare\u27s depiction of Coriolanus and his critics on stage. The essay that follows puts Machiavelli\u27s and Shakespeare\u27s comments on Caius Martius in the context of the ‘factious practices’ they deplored in late medieval Italy and Elizabethan and early Stuart England, respectively
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By discussing several of the issues that complicated the Christian\u27s cohabitation and political participation in this wicked world, as Augustine saw them, the remainder of this contribution will garrison the ground we have gained... more
By discussing several of the issues that complicated the Christian\u27s cohabitation and political participation in this wicked world, as Augustine saw them, the remainder of this contribution will garrison the ground we have gained collecting the bad news he conveyed in his city. We shall inquire whether the assorted consolations he enumerated compensated for the corruption. And we shall consider one reason he might have had for composing his tome as a massive disorienting device. Of course, certainty about authorial intent is impossible to pocket, yet one can make the case that Augustine dropped City of God into the post-410 conversation about empires, conquest, glory, and cupidity to put such ephemera in perspective. Might he have wanted to give pause to colleagues who too readily acquiesced in the hot pursuit of trifles in their terrestrial cities? Before attempting to answer, we ought to ask if dystopia is the right term to characterize Augustine\u27s city where trifles and the...
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During Augustine\u27s life, government authorities were generally friendly to the Christianity he came to adopt and defend. His correspondence mentions one imperial magistrate in Africa, Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, a pagan vicar of... more
During Augustine\u27s life, government authorities were generally friendly to the Christianity he came to adopt and defend. His correspondence mentions one imperial magistrate in Africa, Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, a pagan vicar of Africa who seemed partial to Donatist Christians whom Augustine considered secessionists. Otherwise, from the 390s to 430, assorted proconsuls, vicars, and tribunes sent from the imperial chancery and asked to maintain order in North Africa were willing to enforce government edicts against Donatists and pagans. To an extent, Augustine endorsed enforcement. He was troubled by punitive measures that looked excessive to him, yet scholars generally agree with Peter Burnell that Augustine unambiguously approved punitive judgments as an “unavoidable” necessity. But Burnell and others seem to make too much of it: Augustine\u27s position on punishment supposedly indicates that he posited “an essential continuity” (rather than emphasized the contrast) between “an...
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Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms... more
Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals—puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics—were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the “firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish” promoted a “sense of social distance” between themselves (“the better sort”) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's and Levine's study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism's supposed contributions to social stratification—...
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Research Interests: Christianity, Philosophy, Art, Dante Alighieri, Corruption, and 6 morePope, Divine Comedy, Sedition, Foscolo, Medieval Period, and Rossetti
We know relatively little about prophecies or “exercises” that early Elizabethan reformers devised as in-service training. Nearly all textbooks report that Archbishop Grindal objected to government orders that prophesying be suppressed,... more
We know relatively little about prophecies or “exercises” that early Elizabethan reformers devised as in-service training. Nearly all textbooks report that Archbishop Grindal objected to government orders that prophesying be suppressed, for, in 1576, his reservations cost him the queen's and regime's confidence. Yet the suppressed exercises have lately been depicted as tame Elizabethan adaptations of continental practices that featured sermons delivered publicly but discussed only clerically. That was so in Zurich, Emden, and elsewhere, but I think that if we look at prophesying again, look, that is, at what the critics, patrons, and partisans said about the exercises in England, we will discover that lay involvement and initiative were just as subversive and disruptive as some thought at the time.
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To assist colleagues from other disciplines who teach Augustine’s texts in their core courses, this contribution to the Lilly Colloquium discusses Augustine’s assessments of Emperors Constantine and Theodosius. His presentations of their... more
To assist colleagues from other disciplines who teach Augustine’s texts in their core courses, this contribution to the Lilly Colloquium discusses Augustine’s assessments of Emperors Constantine and Theodosius. His presentations of their tenure in office and their virtues suggest that his position on political leadership corresponds with his general skepticism about political platforms and platitudes. Yet careful reading of his revision of Ambrose’s account of Emperor Theodosius’s public penance and reconsideration of the last five sections of his fifth book City of God—as well as a reappraisal of several of his sermons on the Psalms—suggest that he proposes a radical alternative to political conformity relevant to undergraduates’ conventional expectations of society’s progress and their parts in it
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During Augustine's life, government authorities were generally friendly to the Christianity he came to adopt and defend. His correspondence mentions one imperial magistrate in Africa, Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, a pagan vicar of... more
During Augustine's life, government authorities were generally friendly to the Christianity he came to adopt and defend. His correspondence mentions one imperial magistrate in Africa, Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, a pagan vicar of Africa who seemed partial to Donatist Christians whom Augustine considered secessionists. Otherwise, from the 390s to 430, assorted proconsuls, vicars, and tribunes sent from the imperial chancery and asked to maintain order in North Africa were willing to enforce government edicts against Donatists and pagans. To an extent, Augustine endorsed enforcement. He was troubled by punitive measures that looked excessive to him, yet scholars generally agree with Peter Burnell that Augustine unambiguously approved punitive judgments as an “unavoidable” necessity. But Burnell and others seem to make too much of it: Augustine's position on punishment supposedly indicates that he posited “an essential continuity” (rather than emphasized the contrast) between “...
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Pope Gregory I’s reconstruction of the church’s presence in Rome, and reassertion of Rome’s influence in Italy make his pontificate (590–604) significant for the history of Italian leadership. His correspondence with rivals, counsel for... more
Pope Gregory I’s reconstruction of the church’s presence in Rome, and reassertion of Rome’s influence in Italy make his pontificate (590–604) significant for the history of Italian leadership. His correspondence with rivals, counsel for friends, and deployment of relics furnish historians with an opportunity to reassess what leadership theorists depict as “the humility factor” as well as what theorists identify as the roles of “disruption” and “dissonance” in the formulation and implementation of leadership strategies.
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Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great... more
Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars of succession he chronicled. Nonetheless, “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, and their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems,” Greenblatt says, “to have been Shakespeare's first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s and to have been the inspiration for the “greasy apr...
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Revisionists’ explanations for Thomas More’s willingness to serve as Chancellor have him scheming to support the Aragonese faction at Court--or conspiring with Hapsburg agents to revive papal influence in England in the wake of... more
Revisionists’ explanations for Thomas More’s willingness to serve as Chancellor have him scheming to support the Aragonese faction at Court--or conspiring with Hapsburg agents to revive papal influence in England in the wake of Campeggio’s departure and Wolsey’s “fall.” In late 1529, More was obviously concerned with lay disaffection, troubled by the prospect that sectarian dissidents might capitalize on it to reform the church recklessly, and confident that the realm’s bishops, assisted by the government, could outmaneuver the critics of Roman and English Catholicism, whose arguments for an alternative ecclesiology and soteriology he had opposed earlier that year. “To Assyst” presents More’s concern and confidence as a more plausible answer to the question in its title, more plausible than rival responses on offer.
Research Interests: Law, Art, History of Christianity, Ecclesiology, Heresy, and 5 moreSoteriology, Reform, Bishops, More, and Chancellor
Although the sixteenth century Protestant construction of the reign of King John is a familiar one – John reconfigured into a heroic-victim of the Papacy, providing evidence of England’s pre-Reformation Protestant past – what has received... more
Although the sixteenth century Protestant construction of the reign of King John is a familiar one – John reconfigured into a heroic-victim of the Papacy, providing evidence of England’s pre-Reformation Protestant past – what has received no attention is a further transformation of John that occurs in the last major sixteenth century text to consider his reign. Shakespeare’s King John makes full recourse to earlier Protestant reconstructions of John’s reign but goes further. This paper demonstrates John’s transformation in Shakespeare’s play from the Protestant victim of Fish’s Supplication of Beggars, Bale’s King Johnan and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments into a full-blown Protestant martyr.
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In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the... more
In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the established English church fell to Bishop John Aylmer. Grindal’s friends on the Queen’s Privy Council, “forward” Calvinists (or ultra-Protestants), were powerless to save him from the consequences of his indiscretion, which damaged the chances of success of the ultras’ other initiatives. This chapter concerns one of those initiatives: from the late 1560s, they urged their Queen “actively” to intervene in the Dutch wars. They collaborated with Calvinists on the Continent, who befriended Prince William of Orange and who hoped to help him hold together a coalition of religiously reformed and Roman Catholic insurgents in the 17 provinces of the Low Countries. The English ultra-Protestants would have their government send money, munitions, and men in arms to the...