Seventeenth Century British Poetry

This essay reads Raphael, the principal expositor of scientific knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost, as embodying divergent, virtually antithetical, dispositions towards the prospect of free engagement with natural philosophy within the public sphere.  At once stimulating Adam’s curiosity about the natural world while also overzealously curtailing the range of human inquiry, Raphael inadvertently primes Adam and Eve to fall for Satan’s sophistry by advancing undue restrictions in excess of his divine mandate.  In doing so, Raphael’s pedagogy conveys the uncertainty experienced by Milton and many of his more anxious contemporaries regarding the precise manner by which one should best navigate scientific discussion within a burgeoning public sphere.  Raphael’s dual functions create a dialectic of restrained scientific inquiry that, in the absence of a definitive model for a religiously-informed science predicated on free inquiry, thus constitutes that most Miltonic of paradoxes: the advocacy of investigative liberty superintended by an elite few.

Keywords: Milton, Paradise Lost, Raphael, knowledge, liberty

Abstract: Estimated to be written between 1651 and 1652 (Pole 1966), Andrew Marvell’s four “Mower” poems are the products of the same period following a similar pattern which places each one of them in a consecutive position. Following a similar fashion, the “Mower” poems are brought together as a “suite” (Cousins 2011) among Marvell’s other pastoral works published in the 1681 Folio. In the sequential pattern of the “Mower” poems, the voice of the same speaking persona, Mower, is heard from different angles, literary, scientific and political influences and a distinct perspective of the pastoral tradition. Thus, it is evident that Marvell is a man of his age experiencing the religious, social as well as political turmoil of the seventeenth century England, albeit through his Renaissance background and mind. With this, the focus of the paper is Marvell’s “Mower” poems: “Damon the Mower”, “The Mower to the Glo-Worms”, “The Mower against the Gardens” and the fourth poem, “The Mower’s Song” – pastoral works by Andrew Marvell in his unique perspective reflecting the influence of social and political state of England at the time and the poet’s talent of extracting different traditions and incorporating them to his work.
Keywords: Andrew Marvell, pastoral tradition, seventeenth-century poetry

Milton's early publications evince an ambivalence about books as monuments of poetic achievement.  Milton expresses this ambivalence through his complex  use of the classical motif of the poet's book as his monument, which had become commonplace in the early modern period.

The death of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden precipitated a debate about England's potential role in the Thirty Years War--a debate conducted in funeral elegies and other verse meditations on the late king's death and its implications for England.

This anthology brings together for the first time hundreds of poems about slavery published in English during a crucial historic period, 1660 to 1810. The book is intended for scholars, students, and general readers, for all of whom the subject of slavery and its legacy seems to be growing in importance with every passing year. The editorial approach is both inclusive and radically historical. Many of the poems in this volume have not been reprinted for more than two hundred years. Taken together, they carry us back to a time before the antebellum crises and Civil War—which made slavery seem a particularly American problem—into a context that involved the whole of the anglophone world.

'Dost Thou Know Dover?': Locating Dover in the Early Modern Literary Imagination c.1500-1660 forthcoming in Sweetinburgh et al eds., Maritime Kent through the Ages (Brepols 2021) Brief Chapter synopsis Gloucester's question in King Lear (Act 4 Scene 1 l. 74) forms the starting point for this chapter which seeks to locate Dover in the literary imagination of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by offering a preliminary survey of references that appear in printed works.1 For reasons of space the chapter focused predominantly on poetry and prioritises literature in which Dover has more than a passing reference. The chapter begins by considering the ways in which Dover is located in relation to other landmarks to the North and West and is mentally mapped in metaphors of digression, and ecologically in Herbals. The next section explores the experience of arriving in the town, its reputation for hospitality and the symbolic value of the harbour pier and the white cliffs. The final section explores imagined journeys made from Dover to Calais. 1The quotation is from Act 4 Scene 1 l. 74 William Shakespeare, King Lear R.A. Foakes ed., (Thomson, London 2002).

In 1641, Thomas Beedome’s first and only book, Poems Divine, and Humane, was published posthumously. Considering this volume of poetry in the context of a proliferation of poetry publishign in mid-seventeenth century England and accepting the idea that early modern paratexts provided an ideal site for the renegotiation and manifestation of authorship, I argue that throughout the front matter of Beedome’s book, the largest part of which is taken up by commendatory poetry, a concept of the author not only as singular creator, but also as proprietor of his work is created. This essay shows how the writers of the commendatory verses try to single out Beedome by almost obsessively labelling him as a worthy author, comparing him favourably with classical and contemporary poets, and affirming the proprietary relationship between Beedome and his poems.

The Victorian period is a key moment in the history of sexuality. It is the era in which the modern terminologies we use to structure the ways we think and talk about sexuality were invented. From the 1880s sexologist such as Havelock Ellis pioneered a science in which sexual preferences were analyzed and categorized. Significantly, this began a new opposition of homo- and heterosexuality, categories which did not simply denote sexual behaviour but were perceived as central to each individual‟s identity. A theorist like Eve Sedgwick describes the extent of this concrete movement. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of „sexual orientation‟. By attending to the history of terms we now take for granted we can recognize the social construction, rather than naturality, of our emphasis on sexual identity. Jonathan Katz has argued that heterosexuality be recognized as an creation, and one enabled by the earlier category of homosexuality. This approach has also been valuable to historians of female homosexuality. Terry Castle, has taken this issue with the „no lesbians before 1900 theory‟, and Emma Donoghue has derived that the term „lesbian‟ was used „both as an adjective and a noun to describe women who desired and pleasured each other more than a century and a half before the first entry for that meaning‟. Others, especially in literary studies, have taken the different approach of looking at alternative languages and imageries through which same-sex desire is expressed. Explorations of the diversity of Victorian sexuality thrive in academic and popular work, notably in the faculties of neo-Victorian novels, and screen adaptations of
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Victorian works. Fictions by authors such as Sarah Waters and Wesley Stace, and adaptations like Andrew Davies‟s BBC serials Bleak House and Little Dorrit, are helping to transfer popular perceptions of erotic experience in the 19th century. Apocryphal images of piano legs modestly covered are being replaced with an appreciation of the surprising varieties of Victorian sexuality.

SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa. - 2. Il testo manoscritto: sua presumibile datazione. - 3. Alberico indica al padre i testi agostiniani relativi all’origine dell’anima. - 4. I quattro Sonetti già noti di Alberico Gentili. - 5. Una contestualizzazione storica: la polemica diritto-teologia negli anni 1593/1594. - 6. Il Sonetto inedito alla Regina Elisabetta I d’Inghilterra: le probabili ragioni della sua redazione. - Appendice.
ABSTRACT: The Bodleian Library in Oxford, MS. D’Orville 617, conserves the draft of a letter written by Alberico Gentili to his father Matteo probably on 18th September 1592.
In the letter Alberico shows to the father the Augustinian texts about the origin of the soul: an issue probably debated within the religious and academic circles of London. In the same letter Alberico sends the text of a sonnet dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, giving a further demonstration of the devotion that he feels towards the Sovereign. Indeed, she received him in 1580 when he was exile and in 1587 appointed him as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford.

This note identifies the sources of the three epigraphs that appear on the frontispiece of the second edition of Thomas Randolph's Poems (1640) and analyzes the ways in which they relate to one another and to the contents of the book.  It also examines ways in which the texts of the epigraphs deviate from the wording of their sources, positing explanations for why they do so.  Finally, it suggests that the use of a line from Sidronius Hosschius's encomium of Maciej Kasimierz Sarbiewski (or Casimire) is highly unusual but important evidence regarding the early reception of Sarbiewski in England.

Using Thomas Wilson’s definition of ‘perfect innocency by creation’, this article reads the theme of innocence in the poetry and prose of Thomas Traherne through the doctrine of creation. This approach reveals the rich complexity of Traherne’s innocence and uncovers its theological core. It provides the basis upon which to disinvest Traherne’s works of disenchanted post-Enlightenment associations which have surrounded his concept of natural innocence. In Traherne’s works, ‘perfect innocency by creation’ is not an absolute spiritual perfection or a bare natural innocence. Innocency by creation is a creaturely attribute characterised by the fragility and finitude of material existence. Innocency by creation means that one is created innocent by God, it is a relational status infused by grace and set in motion by love.

The essay argues for a discursive connection between metaphysical poetry as an historically specific literary practice and the more general concern, so characteristic of the period, with putting human knowledge on trial or, more accurately, with subjecting the private experience of knowing to a process of experimental verification.

I have translated here a small selection of the sparkling incantatory verses of that most radical Behmenist, Quirinus Kuhlmann, whom political conspiracy contrived to have burned at the stake like some latter-day Jacques de Molay. I suspect our "Coolman" would be pleased that I am intentionally and perhaps even subversively presenting him here as a Magical stream of consciousness for you to participate in, through actual merging with his flow of words and imagery. My suggestion is that you envision yourself in the 1st person, articulating his imagery as your own; and therefore vicariously (and magically) beholding it, unfolding before you and deeply within you.

We are aware that at present scholars and doctoral researchers are unable to travel to access archives and libraries and that the necessity for timed slots and limited orders at libraries can make research trips from far afield more difficult. For six months from April 2021 the London Renaissance Seminar can offer free research assistance undertaken by two research assistants to work on Renaissance and early modern projects. The work will be undertaken by two postgraduate Research Assistants generously supported by the CHASE partnership graduate consortium. The graduates are specialists in English literature 1550-1720 but are able to extend to historical briefs.

Reading Hutchinson's Genesis epic Order and Disorder against John Dryden's panegyric to Charles II, "Astraea Redux," this essay argues that Dryden's poem depicts the Restoration as the universalist telos to the turbulent romance of English history: God blesses all the nation's people equally in their spiritual marriage to the king, an ecstatic union that subsumes distinctions of gender and ideology by reinscribing all subjects as feminine in sinfulness, as masculine by marriage, and as royalist. Hutchinson resists this triumphalist and masculinist narrative: in her romantic treatment of her biblical protagonists, she insists that both teleological plot and redemptive eroticism are gifts reserved for the Puritan elect, and she suggests that male and female believers need not be divided by hierarchical narrative perspective, sharing equally in the promise of reproduction and in prophetic glimpses of the still-remote "full Restoration."

The fourth and final Literary Manuscripts Masterclass of the 2010 series was given on 22 November by Gillian Wright, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. Dr. Wright, who has been previously associated with the Perdita Project to recover and digitise manuscript material associated with women writers in the Early Modern period, spoke on Bodleian MS. Add. A 119, a letter-book compiled by Mary Arthington, and Bodleian MS. Eng. poet. e. 31, a poetic miscellany compiled by Octavia Walsh.

In an epistle prefacing Thomas Beedome’s 1641 Poems, Divine and Humane, poet and dramatist Henry Glapthorne asserts, “Books are the pictures of mens lives delineated, first by fancy, and by judgement drawne to the life.” Glapthorne qualifies his opening assertion by suggesting that imaginative and rational decision-making mediates readers’ access to authors and their works. Furthermore, Glapthorne points out the need for someone (either the poet or a publisher, editor, or friend) to arrange the material for the reader. Although English anthologies had long been organized around narratives (sonnet sequences, Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres), in chronological order (Drayton’s Poems), by genre (Jonson’s Works), or seemingly not at all (miscellanies), this paper argues that seventeenth-century collections highlighted their increasingly novel organizational strategies through illustrations, paratexts, titles, and other features traditionally associated with print culture that, in turn, influenced the composition and transmission of English poetry both in print and manuscript.

Professor Sarah Hutton will introduce the two volumes of  David  Norbrook’s Works of Lucy Hutchinson  published to date  (OUP, 2011, 2018), Ruth Connolly will introduce Women Poets of the English Civil War (MUP, 2018) edited by Sarah C.E.Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.

Acuity of Wit aims at illuminating the role that the notion of “wonder” played in early modern poetic theory, starting with the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the mid-sixteenth century. By delving into debates and controversies taking place between the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas, it demonstrates that scholars from Lodovico Castelvetro to Francesco Patrizi to Alonso López Pinciano developed a theoretical framework able to account for the transition from a feeling of wonder aroused by the unexpectedness of plot twists, paradoxical statements and far-fetched metaphors to a feeling of marvel towards the “subtlety” or “acuity” of the wit responsible for any of these. In doing so, I propose a series of often-neglected continuities between sixteenth-century Aristotelianism and the interest in ingenuity generally associated with seventeenth-century Jesuit theorists of “acutezza” or “agudeza”, such as Matteo Peregrini and Baltasar Gracián. For the latter, the ability to market wonders became the main criterion by which to judge the value of a poet and the path to conceive aesthetic values in a poem or a speech. I further show that the taste for wonder and acuity of wit eventually colonized spaces as apparently alien to it as history. Historians influenced by the renewed popularity of Tacitus saw themselves as making use of “acuity of wit” to decipher intentions that the agents had cunningly dissimulated. By doing so, they entered a space halfway between reciprocity and challenge, in which writing was experienced as a contest to outwit princes and courtiers in a game of unveiling inner thoughts and secrets. Finally, I explore how early modern writers and theorists conceived of acuity of wit as a virtue that can be noticed only through the active cooperation of the reader in the process of decoding and unfolding arguments. In a series of highly controversial debates touching on contemporary literary fashions such as the so-called “laconic style” or Luis de Góngora’s “new poetry”, scholars such as Virgilio Malvezzi or Francisco Fernández de Córdoba reversed principles inherited from ancient rhetoric to relocate aesthetic pleasure in the interdependence and competition between author and reader.

This article identifies a biblical allusion in John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis not previously noted. It argues that Dryden describes the looting undertaken by Sir Robert Holmes’s sailors in their raid on the Vlie estuary in terms that associate them with Hophni and Phinehas, the sacrilegious sons of the high priest Eli, called “sons of Belial” in 1 Samuel. This allusion subverts the propaganda function of the poem by calling into question the morality of England’s economic and imperial expansion, and lends credence to the suggestion of Dutch writers that the Great Fire of London represents divine retribution for “Holmes’s Bonfire.”