What might a turn to Erich Auerbach and his great contemporary interpreter Jacques Rancière have to offer the study of Renaissance literature today? For nearly forty years of professional scholarship, “Renaissance” has typically meant either the inauguration of, or a premodern alternative to, a catastrophic modernity. “Renaissance” has been, in this sense, part of that regime of historicity that François Hartog terms “presentism.” Auerbach and Rancière, I suggest, offer a way out of the unending treadmill of presentism in Renaissance scholarship and beyond. Throughout Auerbach’s work, and particular in Mimesis, Renaissance meant the historical diversity that emerges when you decide human life is subject to no absolute manner of judging. Rancière picks up on this diversity and calls it “aisthesis,” the dissensus that unravels all absolute distributions of sensibility. I offer Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd” as a test case for some of the possibilities Auerbach’s Renaissance might make available. The invitation of Marlowe’s poem is not simply an invitation to love; it is an invitation to the possibilities of an aesthetic life lived in history. [C.W.]
{"title":"A Proof of Pleasure: Renaissance in Rancière, Auerbach, Marlowe","authors":"Christopher Warley","doi":"10.1086/728000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/728000","url":null,"abstract":"What might a turn to Erich Auerbach and his great contemporary interpreter Jacques Rancière have to offer the study of Renaissance literature today? For nearly forty years of professional scholarship, “Renaissance” has typically meant either the inauguration of, or a premodern alternative to, a catastrophic modernity. “Renaissance” has been, in this sense, part of that regime of historicity that François Hartog terms “presentism.” Auerbach and Rancière, I suggest, offer a way out of the unending treadmill of presentism in Renaissance scholarship and beyond. Throughout Auerbach’s work, and particular in Mimesis, Renaissance meant the historical diversity that emerges when you decide human life is subject to no absolute manner of judging. Rancière picks up on this diversity and calls it “aisthesis,” the dissensus that unravels all absolute distributions of sensibility. I offer Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd” as a test case for some of the possibilities Auerbach’s Renaissance might make available. The invitation of Marlowe’s poem is not simply an invitation to love; it is an invitation to the possibilities of an aesthetic life lived in history. [C.W.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"82 10","pages":"107 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139127598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay analyzes how Sidney uses the metaphor of “penetration” to explore the moral and psychic effects of the encounter between poem and reader. I contextualize Sidney’s use of this metaphor, starting from a moment in the Lady of May, where the pedant Rombus reflects on the “penetrancy” of pastoral singing. Invoking both classical and Christian contexts, the term represents rhetorical force as violent and invasive, yielding different affordances than other Elizabethan metaphors for poetic influence (such as digestion, movement, or temptation). Sidney himself adopts this metaphor to yoke together two incommensurate and perhaps mutually unintelligible subject positions: penetrated and penetrator, piercing and being pierced. I juxtapose a reading of Barnabe Barnes’s use of the same metaphor, closing with a reading of the bower in the old Arcadia. In so doing, I hope to offer an alternative account of how Sidney thinks with metaphor, emphasizing not how he resolves his central tensions but rather how he sustains incompatible readings. Our disagreements over Sidney’s views of reading, of morality, and of the relation between beauty and virtue result from his poetics of metaphor and wit. [M.H.]
{"title":"Sidney’s Penetrations: Metaphors and Ideas","authors":"Matthew P. Harrison","doi":"10.1086/727996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727996","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes how Sidney uses the metaphor of “penetration” to explore the moral and psychic effects of the encounter between poem and reader. I contextualize Sidney’s use of this metaphor, starting from a moment in the Lady of May, where the pedant Rombus reflects on the “penetrancy” of pastoral singing. Invoking both classical and Christian contexts, the term represents rhetorical force as violent and invasive, yielding different affordances than other Elizabethan metaphors for poetic influence (such as digestion, movement, or temptation). Sidney himself adopts this metaphor to yoke together two incommensurate and perhaps mutually unintelligible subject positions: penetrated and penetrator, piercing and being pierced. I juxtapose a reading of Barnabe Barnes’s use of the same metaphor, closing with a reading of the bower in the old Arcadia. In so doing, I hope to offer an alternative account of how Sidney thinks with metaphor, emphasizing not how he resolves his central tensions but rather how he sustains incompatible readings. Our disagreements over Sidney’s views of reading, of morality, and of the relation between beauty and virtue result from his poetics of metaphor and wit. [M.H.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"19 5","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139126422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay argues that the seventeenth-century British writer, Lucy Hutchinson, experiments with the form and content of her early prose and late poetry in ways that reveal the everyday dimensions of warfare, as it was experienced on the ground and in the periodical news of the period. During the mid-1640s, in the midst of the civil wars, Hutchinson produced an untitled manuscript, an episodic narrative of local war that overlaps with print journalism. After the Restoration, she produced a series of manuscript poems that combine Parliamentary elegies for soldiers with the genres of aubade and nocturne to criticize a public violence now concentrated in the monarchal state. As Hutchinson shifts from composing a kind of war correspondence that supports the war effort to a species of war elegy critical of state hostilities, she frames armed conflict not as an exceptional event but as a form of business as usual: it depends on and reshapes the infrastructures, spaces, emotions, and habits of quotidian life and becomes, in its turn, a normalized version of that life. Across different contexts and genres, then, she helps reveal the key role of the ordinary in war alongside the ways war itself becomes ordinary, part of the real and journalistic everyday. [C.G.]
{"title":"Lucy Hutchinson’s Everyday War: The 1640s Manuscript and her Restoration ‘Elegies’","authors":"Catharine Gray","doi":"10.1086/727999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727999","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that the seventeenth-century British writer, Lucy Hutchinson, experiments with the form and content of her early prose and late poetry in ways that reveal the everyday dimensions of warfare, as it was experienced on the ground and in the periodical news of the period. During the mid-1640s, in the midst of the civil wars, Hutchinson produced an untitled manuscript, an episodic narrative of local war that overlaps with print journalism. After the Restoration, she produced a series of manuscript poems that combine Parliamentary elegies for soldiers with the genres of aubade and nocturne to criticize a public violence now concentrated in the monarchal state. As Hutchinson shifts from composing a kind of war correspondence that supports the war effort to a species of war elegy critical of state hostilities, she frames armed conflict not as an exceptional event but as a form of business as usual: it depends on and reshapes the infrastructures, spaces, emotions, and habits of quotidian life and becomes, in its turn, a normalized version of that life. Across different contexts and genres, then, she helps reveal the key role of the ordinary in war alongside the ways war itself becomes ordinary, part of the real and journalistic everyday. [C.G.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"135 13","pages":"76 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139128338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1591, Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, wrote an autobiographical letter to her friend and one-time household chaplain, John Layfield, in which she places her grief at the recent death of her five-year-old son within a narrative of her life. Through this letter, she engages in the Renaissance consolatio tradition and other contemporary forms of lament modeled on Christian scripture. She draws upon classical philosophical works such as Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy along with other philosophical work as she constructs her narrative. She places her suffering within seventeenth-century providentialism, including reference to a dream that presaged the death of her child. The letter critiques, and ultimately discards, the comforts of the consolatio tradition and even her sense of the providential as means to relieve grief, ultimately rejecting these for an affective plea to the divine. Russell creates a powerful autobiographical narrative of suffering that exposes the limitations of contemporary philosophical and providential discourse in relieving the mental distress experienced by seventeenth-century individuals. An edition of Russell’s letter is included. [J.M.]
{"title":"Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland’s Letter to John Layfield: Composing Grief through Consolation and Lamentation","authors":"Jessica L. Malay","doi":"10.1086/727997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727997","url":null,"abstract":"In 1591, Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, wrote an autobiographical letter to her friend and one-time household chaplain, John Layfield, in which she places her grief at the recent death of her five-year-old son within a narrative of her life. Through this letter, she engages in the Renaissance consolatio tradition and other contemporary forms of lament modeled on Christian scripture. She draws upon classical philosophical works such as Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy along with other philosophical work as she constructs her narrative. She places her suffering within seventeenth-century providentialism, including reference to a dream that presaged the death of her child. The letter critiques, and ultimately discards, the comforts of the consolatio tradition and even her sense of the providential as means to relieve grief, ultimately rejecting these for an affective plea to the divine. Russell creates a powerful autobiographical narrative of suffering that exposes the limitations of contemporary philosophical and providential discourse in relieving the mental distress experienced by seventeenth-century individuals. An edition of Russell’s letter is included. [J.M.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"22 3","pages":"26 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139127192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In August 1634, Sir Thomas Salusbury’s (1612–1643) “Chirk Castle Entertainment” was staged by Sir Thomas Myddelton (1586–1666) to welcome John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater and Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches. The “Entertainment” acted as a scaffold for a feast which showcased a golden world of Edenic plenty at Chirk. Salusbury’s verse emphasized the food’s “native” qualities. Yet, when read against contemporary recipes and the feast’s sensory experience, the presence of worldwide trade networks is evident on Chirk’s provincial banqueting tables. This intersectionality of the local and global befitted the Myddelton family who amassed their astonishing wealth through the mercantile ventures in the East Indies and the New World of Myddelton’s father, Sir Thomas Myddelton (c.1556–1631). Such multiplicity was crafted into the fabric of Chirk Castle and displayed in the feast’s food cultures. Yet, Salusbury’s verse elides these cross-cultural encounters, suggesting a difficulty in integrating London merchant culture into 1630s Denbighshire. This essay moves between the local focus of Salusbury’s verse and the global traces inherent in Myddelton’s feast to recreate a glimpse at Chirk Castle of a new global whole. [R.B.]
{"title":"“Noe dish whose tast, or dressing, is unknown / Unto oʳ natives”: Local and Global Material Cultures in the Food Rituals of Thomas Salusbury’s 1634 “Chirk Castle Entertainment”","authors":"Rebecca A. Bailey","doi":"10.1086/727998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727998","url":null,"abstract":"In August 1634, Sir Thomas Salusbury’s (1612–1643) “Chirk Castle Entertainment” was staged by Sir Thomas Myddelton (1586–1666) to welcome John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater and Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches. The “Entertainment” acted as a scaffold for a feast which showcased a golden world of Edenic plenty at Chirk. Salusbury’s verse emphasized the food’s “native” qualities. Yet, when read against contemporary recipes and the feast’s sensory experience, the presence of worldwide trade networks is evident on Chirk’s provincial banqueting tables. This intersectionality of the local and global befitted the Myddelton family who amassed their astonishing wealth through the mercantile ventures in the East Indies and the New World of Myddelton’s father, Sir Thomas Myddelton (c.1556–1631). Such multiplicity was crafted into the fabric of Chirk Castle and displayed in the feast’s food cultures. Yet, Salusbury’s verse elides these cross-cultural encounters, suggesting a difficulty in integrating London merchant culture into 1630s Denbighshire. This essay moves between the local focus of Salusbury’s verse and the global traces inherent in Myddelton’s feast to recreate a glimpse at Chirk Castle of a new global whole. [R.B.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"34 12","pages":"52 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139129495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The poetic atomism of Lucretius seems an obvious point of convergence between Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, but this convergence is complicated both by their later disavowals of atomism and by scholarship that casts doubt on even their early interest in Lucretius. In this essay, I argue that in their lyrics, Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson engage Lucretius in a hybrid and nondogmatic way that is less focused on atomism’s physical system (that is, on the mechanics of atomist physics) than on using ideas from De rerum natura about poetry and mortality to think about memory, memorialization, and afterlives—of bodies, reputations, and texts. Both Cavendish and Hutchinson engage the issues of materiality and mortality at the heart of Lucretian thought as a way of conceptualizing the capacity of lyric poetry to depict the experience of change and loss at the heart of mortal life, the experience of both being and loving what Hutchinson in her elegies calls “transeant Things.” Hutchinson’s appreciation for and dwelling with “transeant Things” carves out a space within her elegies for an affirmation of both erotic love and also of lyric poetry. [J.H.]
{"title":"“transeant Things”: Materialism and Mortality in the Lyrics of Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish","authors":"J. Hock","doi":"10.1086/726101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726101","url":null,"abstract":"The poetic atomism of Lucretius seems an obvious point of convergence between Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, but this convergence is complicated both by their later disavowals of atomism and by scholarship that casts doubt on even their early interest in Lucretius. In this essay, I argue that in their lyrics, Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson engage Lucretius in a hybrid and nondogmatic way that is less focused on atomism’s physical system (that is, on the mechanics of atomist physics) than on using ideas from De rerum natura about poetry and mortality to think about memory, memorialization, and afterlives—of bodies, reputations, and texts. Both Cavendish and Hutchinson engage the issues of materiality and mortality at the heart of Lucretian thought as a way of conceptualizing the capacity of lyric poetry to depict the experience of change and loss at the heart of mortal life, the experience of both being and loving what Hutchinson in her elegies calls “transeant Things.” Hutchinson’s appreciation for and dwelling with “transeant Things” carves out a space within her elegies for an affirmation of both erotic love and also of lyric poetry. [J.H.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"53 1","pages":"425 - 449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44421019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Margaret Cavendish’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s sartorial presentations have often been regarded as largely apolitical: Cavendish’s a part of her eccentric public persona, and Hutchinson’s a badge of puritanism and wifely sobriety. This essay argues instead that Cavendish and Hutchinson deploy politically charged (and surprisingly comparable) rhetorics of dress in their writings, both harnessing the power of fashionable singularity to express intra-party dissent. Examining two of Cavendish’s plays, A Piece of a Play and A Comedy of the Apocriphal Ladies, and Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, this analysis shows how both writers push back against a politic of modish copying as expressed by writers such as John Evelyn, whose Tyrannus imagines standardized fashion as a way to underscore the power of bureaucratic gentry regulators after the Restoration. Analyzing the ways that Hutchinson and Cavendish both harness discordant dress as a form of political critique (albeit to disparate political ends) reveals how powerful rhetorics of dress travelled across seventeenth-century political divides, and helps push our understanding of the sartorial sensibilities of both writers beyond the frameworks of austere puritan wife or extravagant dresser. [K.L.]
{"title":"Singular Modes: The Politics of Dress in Cavendish, Evelyn, and Hutchinson","authors":"Katharine Landers","doi":"10.1086/726099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726099","url":null,"abstract":"Margaret Cavendish’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s sartorial presentations have often been regarded as largely apolitical: Cavendish’s a part of her eccentric public persona, and Hutchinson’s a badge of puritanism and wifely sobriety. This essay argues instead that Cavendish and Hutchinson deploy politically charged (and surprisingly comparable) rhetorics of dress in their writings, both harnessing the power of fashionable singularity to express intra-party dissent. Examining two of Cavendish’s plays, A Piece of a Play and A Comedy of the Apocriphal Ladies, and Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, this analysis shows how both writers push back against a politic of modish copying as expressed by writers such as John Evelyn, whose Tyrannus imagines standardized fashion as a way to underscore the power of bureaucratic gentry regulators after the Restoration. Analyzing the ways that Hutchinson and Cavendish both harness discordant dress as a form of political critique (albeit to disparate political ends) reveals how powerful rhetorics of dress travelled across seventeenth-century political divides, and helps push our understanding of the sartorial sensibilities of both writers beyond the frameworks of austere puritan wife or extravagant dresser. [K.L.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"53 1","pages":"351 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46116940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scholars have often situated the atomic ideas in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653) in relation to Lucy Hutchinson’s contemporaneous manuscript translation of the Roman poet Lucretius’ epic, De rerum natura, which articulates the principles of the ancient Greek atomist Epicurus. On the whole, these works have been read as expressions of the radical, materialistic impulses of both authors. Yet whereas at least some have taken Hutchinson’s denunciation of Lucretius’ “wicked pernitious doctrines” seriously, Cavendish is widely assumed to have embraced them. This essay begins by arguing that Cavendish was never a committed atomist. It suggests, instead, that her aim in Poems, and Fancies was to give atomism a fair hearing upon reading Josuah Sylvester’s Devine Weekes and Workes (1605), which entertained other ancient natural philosophies but rejected Epicureanism out of hand. I then turn to Cavendish’s appraisal of Epicurean ethics. In contrast to Sylvester, who linked Epicureanism with debauchery, Cavendish, I argue, sided with Pierre Gassendi’s more positive depiction of Epicurean ethics as compatible with Christianity. I conclude that the views found in Poems, and Fancies were far less philosophically and theologically heterodox than is usually supposed, and, indeed, that they were in many ways more orthodox than those of Hutchinson. [J.B.]
学者们经常将玛格丽特·卡文迪许（Margaret Cavendish）的《诗歌与幻想》（1653）中的原子思想与露西·哈钦森（Lucy Hutchinson）同期翻译的罗马诗人卢克莱修（Lucretius）史诗《自然》（De rerum natura）的手稿联系起来，后者阐述了古希腊原子主义者伊壁鸠鲁（Epicurus）的原则。总的来说，这些作品被解读为两位作者激进、物质主义冲动的表达。然而，尽管至少有一些人认真对待哈钦森对卢克莱修“邪恶邪恶学说”的谴责，但人们普遍认为卡文迪许接受了这些学说。这篇文章一开始就认为卡文迪许从来都不是一个坚定的原子论者。相反，这表明她在《诗与幻想》中的目的是在阅读乔舒亚·西尔维斯特的《魔鬼的工作》（1605）时，给原子论一个公平的听证会，该书接受了其他古代自然哲学，但立即拒绝了伊壁鸠鲁主义。然后我转向卡文迪许对伊壁鸠鲁伦理学的评价。西尔维斯特将伊壁鸠鲁主义与放荡联系在一起，我认为，卡文迪什站在皮埃尔·加森迪一边，他更积极地描述了伊壁鸠里亚伦理与基督教兼容。我得出的结论是，《诗与幻想》中的观点在哲学和神学上远没有人们通常认为的那么异端，事实上，它们在很多方面都比哈钦森的观点更正统。[J.B.]
{"title":"Margaret Cavendish Reads Josuah Sylvester: Epicurus, Atheism, and Atomic Skepticism in Poems, and Fancies","authors":"J. Begley","doi":"10.1086/726100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726100","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have often situated the atomic ideas in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653) in relation to Lucy Hutchinson’s contemporaneous manuscript translation of the Roman poet Lucretius’ epic, De rerum natura, which articulates the principles of the ancient Greek atomist Epicurus. On the whole, these works have been read as expressions of the radical, materialistic impulses of both authors. Yet whereas at least some have taken Hutchinson’s denunciation of Lucretius’ “wicked pernitious doctrines” seriously, Cavendish is widely assumed to have embraced them. This essay begins by arguing that Cavendish was never a committed atomist. It suggests, instead, that her aim in Poems, and Fancies was to give atomism a fair hearing upon reading Josuah Sylvester’s Devine Weekes and Workes (1605), which entertained other ancient natural philosophies but rejected Epicureanism out of hand. I then turn to Cavendish’s appraisal of Epicurean ethics. In contrast to Sylvester, who linked Epicureanism with debauchery, Cavendish, I argue, sided with Pierre Gassendi’s more positive depiction of Epicurean ethics as compatible with Christianity. I conclude that the views found in Poems, and Fancies were far less philosophically and theologically heterodox than is usually supposed, and, indeed, that they were in many ways more orthodox than those of Hutchinson. [J.B.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"53 1","pages":"376 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49540940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Neither Margaret Cavendish nor Lucy Hutchinson was ever an atomist or believed that atomic matter made up the universe, and this essay argues that we need to re-narrate the way we describe the development of Cavendish’s natural philosophy, as Cavendish is neither espousing atomism nor engaging with Lucretius in the atomic poetry that appears in her first publication. Nevertheless, both Hutchinson and Cavendish engage with atomism in their poetry. These two poets turn to atomism not because they hold atomic philosophical beliefs, but because atomism helps them to ask questions about what and how it is possible to know, including—for Cavendish as well as Hutchinson—in the realm of theology. Their poetic engagements with atomic philosophy allow each of them to carve out space for epistemologies beyond empiricism. [L.B.]
{"title":"Non-Atomic Atomisms and Atomic Epistemologies in the Poetry of Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson","authors":"Liza Blake","doi":"10.1086/726202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726202","url":null,"abstract":"Neither Margaret Cavendish nor Lucy Hutchinson was ever an atomist or believed that atomic matter made up the universe, and this essay argues that we need to re-narrate the way we describe the development of Cavendish’s natural philosophy, as Cavendish is neither espousing atomism nor engaging with Lucretius in the atomic poetry that appears in her first publication. Nevertheless, both Hutchinson and Cavendish engage with atomism in their poetry. These two poets turn to atomism not because they hold atomic philosophical beliefs, but because atomism helps them to ask questions about what and how it is possible to know, including—for Cavendish as well as Hutchinson—in the realm of theology. Their poetic engagements with atomic philosophy allow each of them to carve out space for epistemologies beyond empiricism. [L.B.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"53 1","pages":"401 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47235280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson used similar generic strategies, borrowed from the mid-century petition, when composing biographies of their husbands, The Life of William Cavendish and Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. While both authors use their prefaces to frame their biographies as dispassionate recitations of historical fact, rather than defending a purely documentary regime, such pronouncements obliquely prompt readers to search for deviations from the authors’ biographic agendas. This essay will argue that Cavendish and Hutchinson used the biographies of their husbands to disguise and promote political critiques that ultimately reveal the autocratic impulses of Charles II in the early years of the Restoration. Such critiques, I propose, are grounded in the complementary self-presentations of the authors. Informed by their common experience as petitioners of unfriendly bureaucracies, Cavendish and Hutchinson style themselves as advocates for constitutional monarchy and particularly the preservation of rights and privileges due to English citizens. Finally, by examining the intersection of biography and autobiography, petition and legal testimony, this essay challenges the scholarly tendency to assign highly gendered critical frameworks to Memoirs and Life of William, which are more likely to be described as wifely romances than as political treatises. [L.D.F.]
{"title":"Lucy Hutchinson’s and Margaret Cavendish’s Petitionary Lives","authors":"Laura De Furio","doi":"10.1086/726098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726098","url":null,"abstract":"Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson used similar generic strategies, borrowed from the mid-century petition, when composing biographies of their husbands, The Life of William Cavendish and Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. While both authors use their prefaces to frame their biographies as dispassionate recitations of historical fact, rather than defending a purely documentary regime, such pronouncements obliquely prompt readers to search for deviations from the authors’ biographic agendas. This essay will argue that Cavendish and Hutchinson used the biographies of their husbands to disguise and promote political critiques that ultimately reveal the autocratic impulses of Charles II in the early years of the Restoration. Such critiques, I propose, are grounded in the complementary self-presentations of the authors. Informed by their common experience as petitioners of unfriendly bureaucracies, Cavendish and Hutchinson style themselves as advocates for constitutional monarchy and particularly the preservation of rights and privileges due to English citizens. Finally, by examining the intersection of biography and autobiography, petition and legal testimony, this essay challenges the scholarly tendency to assign highly gendered critical frameworks to Memoirs and Life of William, which are more likely to be described as wifely romances than as political treatises. [L.D.F.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"53 1","pages":"327 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44144686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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