Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919346
Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Matteo Pangallo, Rachel White
Abstract:
The manuscript play Dick of Devonshire has been attributed to several early modern dramatists, including Thomas Heywood, Robert Davenport, James Shirley, and Thomas Dekker. Identifying the author is important to obtaining a better understanding of the play's place in the Caroline commercial theater industry and how it came to be staged by Queen Henrietta Maria's Men in the summer of 1626. This article reviews the arguments that have been made for and against the various authorial candidates and, using historical and literary evidence as well as new computational analysis, establishes that Thomas Heywood is the play's most likely author.
{"title":"\"Text up his name\": The Authorship of the Manuscript Play Dick of Devonshire","authors":"Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Matteo Pangallo, Rachel White","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919346","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The manuscript play <i>Dick of Devonshire</i> has been attributed to several early modern dramatists, including Thomas Heywood, Robert Davenport, James Shirley, and Thomas Dekker. Identifying the author is important to obtaining a better understanding of the play's place in the Caroline commercial theater industry and how it came to be staged by Queen Henrietta Maria's Men in the summer of 1626. This article reviews the arguments that have been made for and against the various authorial candidates and, using historical and literary evidence as well as new computational analysis, establishes that Thomas Heywood is the play's most likely author.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"76 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139753078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919343
Oliver Wort
Abstract:
This is a study of William Forrest's "Legend of Theophilus." In the history of devil-compact literature, Theophilus was the ur-Faustus, the preeminent example all across medieval Europe of the foolish man who, for worldly gain, abandoned his soul to the devil. Finished on 27 October 1572, Forrest's version of this tale is a rare example of an English Theophilus legend written in the aftermath of the Reformation rather than in advance of it. This novel context permits Forrest to treat the legend as a critique of Reformation and a defense of Catholic devotion, particularly to the Virgin Mary. Furthermore, as an Elizabethan study in damnation and redemption, Forrest's poem is comparable to Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, though the two are products of fundamentally different religious milieus. This study ends by reading Forrest's atypical Elizabethan poem alongside Marlowe's more quintessentially Elizabethan play in order to draw out what is most distinctive about both works and the divine economies that animate them.
{"title":"\"From god astraye went\": William Forrest's Contra-Reformation \"Legend of Theophilus\"","authors":"Oliver Wort","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919343","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This is a study of William Forrest's \"Legend of Theophilus.\" In the history of devil-compact literature, Theophilus was the ur-Faustus, the preeminent example all across medieval Europe of the foolish man who, for worldly gain, abandoned his soul to the devil. Finished on 27 October 1572, Forrest's version of this tale is a rare example of an English Theophilus legend written in the aftermath of the Reformation rather than in advance of it. This novel context permits Forrest to treat the legend as a critique of Reformation and a defense of Catholic devotion, particularly to the Virgin Mary. Furthermore, as an Elizabethan study in damnation and redemption, Forrest's poem is comparable to Christopher Marlowe's <i>Doctor Faustus</i>, though the two are products of fundamentally different religious milieus. This study ends by reading Forrest's atypical Elizabethan poem alongside Marlowe's more quintessentially Elizabethan play in order to draw out what is most distinctive about both works and the divine economies that animate them.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139753156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919341
Peter Ramey
Abstract:
Debates over the role of Christianity in Beowulf have not fully taken into account hagiographic models. Although saints' lives were among the first written materials to flourish in early medieval England, relatively little has been done to examine the influence of hagiography on Beowulf. After considering some of the reasons for the lack of such approaches, this essay examines Beowulf in light of hagiographic conventions and concepts, arguing that the Beowulf-poet invests the traditional warrior identity of the hero Beowulf with conceptions of sanctity found in saints' lives composed by Bede, Felix, and others. In the process, this essay challenges the prevailing "dramatic irony" view of the poem that divorces the religious understanding of the narrator from that of the characters. A thorough analysis reveals that characters and narrator speak a shared theological language and that the religious perspectives of narrator and dramatis personae are indistinguishable.
{"title":"St. Beowulf: Hagiography and Heroic Identity in Beowulf","authors":"Peter Ramey","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919341","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Debates over the role of Christianity in <i>Beowulf</i> have not fully taken into account hagiographic models. Although saints' lives were among the first written materials to flourish in early medieval England, relatively little has been done to examine the influence of hagiography on <i>Beowulf</i>. After considering some of the reasons for the lack of such approaches, this essay examines <i>Beowulf</i> in light of hagiographic conventions and concepts, arguing that the <i>Beowulf</i>-poet invests the traditional warrior identity of the hero Beowulf with conceptions of sanctity found in saints' lives composed by Bede, Felix, and others. In the process, this essay challenges the prevailing \"dramatic irony\" view of the poem that divorces the religious understanding of the narrator from that of the characters. A thorough analysis reveals that characters and narrator speak a shared theological language and that the religious perspectives of narrator and <i>dramatis personae</i> are indistinguishable.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139763779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919342
Carl Grey Martin
Abstract:
This essay explores how the visual culture of the portrait in the early Tudor period, epitomized by Hans Holbein's work, informed and intensified the self-examination, pictorialism, and textual play of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "epistolary satire" to John Pointz, a fellow courtier. Specifically, I argue that Wyatt's ambivalent self-description in this overtly self-righteous poem reimagines the memento mori—a visual reminder of vulnerability and death, often incorporated in portraiture—to deliberately undermine his Stoic self-assertion and to rebuke the reader's credulity.
{"title":"The Cloak and the Clog: Tudor Portraiture and Sir Thomas Wyatt's \"Myne owne John Poyntz\"","authors":"Carl Grey Martin","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919342","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay explores how the visual culture of the portrait in the early Tudor period, epitomized by Hans Holbein's work, informed and intensified the self-examination, pictorialism, and textual play of Sir Thomas Wyatt's \"epistolary satire\" to John Pointz, a fellow courtier. Specifically, I argue that Wyatt's ambivalent self-description in this overtly self-righteous poem reimagines the <i>memento mori</i>—a visual reminder of vulnerability and death, often incorporated in portraiture—to deliberately undermine his Stoic self-assertion and to rebuke the reader's credulity.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139753087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919344
Emily A. Ransom
Abstract:
While still a fugitive at large, the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell published his best-selling prose masterpiece, Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares, which deftly combines the English literary vogue of complaint with Ignatian meditation in an eloquent grand style. While scholarship has mostly treated this work as a meditation for recusant Catholics separated from Christ's body in the Eucharist, as Mary was separated from Christ on Easter morning, this article argues that its widespread popularity and literary influence was a strategic success in large part owing to its bold and timely approach to human passions directed to its Protestant readers. In an era in which England's "finest wits are now given to write passionat discourses," Southwell suggested an alternative both to Neostoic curbing of passion and even to Augustinian moderation, presenting the Magdalen as a figure of godly vehemence in whom reason itself is ruled by a love in which "the excesse cannot be faultie."
{"title":"Passions and the Passion: Robert Southwell's Mary Magdalene","authors":"Emily A. Ransom","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919344","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>While still a fugitive at large, the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell published his best-selling prose masterpiece, <i>Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares</i>, which deftly combines the English literary vogue of complaint with Ignatian meditation in an eloquent grand style. While scholarship has mostly treated this work as a meditation for recusant Catholics separated from Christ's body in the Eucharist, as Mary was separated from Christ on Easter morning, this article argues that its widespread popularity and literary influence was a strategic success in large part owing to its bold and timely approach to human passions directed to its Protestant readers. In an era in which England's \"finest wits are now given to write passionat discourses,\" Southwell suggested an alternative both to Neostoic curbing of passion and even to Augustinian moderation, presenting the Magdalen as a figure of godly vehemence in whom reason itself is ruled by a love in which \"the excesse cannot be faultie.\"</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"94 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139753632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-17DOI: 10.1353/sip.2024.a919345
Lauren Weindling
Abstract:
This article takes as its subject a philological explication of the name of Touchstone, the fool in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, unpacking its connotations by tracking its usage in early modern print material. Literally a stone used to test gold's purity, the touchstone's metaphorical usage reveals a cultural desire to know true from feigning and likewise intimates violent interrogation when addressing the Jesuit threat to Queen Elizabeth's rule. This enlarged context illuminates a critique of this epistemological method in Touchstone's comedy. There is no certain method to test others, for identity and allegiance are not innate qualities exposed with violent pressure but products of verbal play. Moreover, this method presupposes, then fabricates, guilt.
{"title":"\"I do play the touch\": Touchstone and Testing in As You Like It","authors":"Lauren Weindling","doi":"10.1353/sip.2024.a919345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2024.a919345","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article takes as its subject a philological explication of the name of Touchstone, the fool in William Shakespeare's <i>As You Like It</i>, unpacking its connotations by tracking its usage in early modern print material. Literally a stone used to test gold's purity, the touchstone's metaphorical usage reveals a cultural desire to know true from feigning and likewise intimates violent interrogation when addressing the Jesuit threat to Queen Elizabeth's rule. This enlarged context illuminates a critique of this epistemological method in Touchstone's comedy. There is no certain method to test others, for identity and allegiance are not innate qualities exposed with violent pressure but products of verbal play. Moreover, this method presupposes, then fabricates, guilt.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139753766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sip.2023.a910771
Terence N. Bowers
Abstract: The influence of John Locke's political thought on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has often been discussed. Most studies have focused on how the novel speaks to political crises in England, especially those surrounding the Glorious Revolution, which have traditionally been seen as forming the key context for understanding Locke's Two Treatises of Government . But recent scholarship has shown that the Two Treatises also addressed the colonial context in America and provided the intellectual platform that justified British expansion in the New World. Though studies of Robinson Crusoe have for some time analyzed the novel in the context of colonialism, Locke has not figured much in such analyses. This essay argues, however, that Locke's key connection to Robinson Crusoe is his view of America and empire and that Defoe's story of survival in the wild builds on and powerfully reinforces Locke's colonial ideology, which is grounded in a vision of how human beings should (and should not relate) to the earth. This vision is deeply anthropocentric and matches what the environmental historian Donald Worster calls "the 'imperial' view of nature." The vision of empire shared by Locke and Defoe is thus based on and inseparable from a quest for ecological dominion that is global in scope. In the latter part of the essay, I discuss the astounding popularity of the Crusoe story and its status as myth and argue that it constitutes a version of what Carolyn Merchant terms the "Recovery Narrative," which forms "perhaps the most important mythology that humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth." Given its influence and enduring popularity, I suggest that we see Robinson Crusoe as a key text and driver of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human activities have altered the planet's land surfaces, oceans, and biosphere and produced the environmental crises that we face today.
{"title":"John Locke, Ecological Imperialism, and the Narration of the Land in Robinson Crusoe —A Tale of the Anthropocene","authors":"Terence N. Bowers","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910771","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The influence of John Locke's political thought on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has often been discussed. Most studies have focused on how the novel speaks to political crises in England, especially those surrounding the Glorious Revolution, which have traditionally been seen as forming the key context for understanding Locke's Two Treatises of Government . But recent scholarship has shown that the Two Treatises also addressed the colonial context in America and provided the intellectual platform that justified British expansion in the New World. Though studies of Robinson Crusoe have for some time analyzed the novel in the context of colonialism, Locke has not figured much in such analyses. This essay argues, however, that Locke's key connection to Robinson Crusoe is his view of America and empire and that Defoe's story of survival in the wild builds on and powerfully reinforces Locke's colonial ideology, which is grounded in a vision of how human beings should (and should not relate) to the earth. This vision is deeply anthropocentric and matches what the environmental historian Donald Worster calls \"the 'imperial' view of nature.\" The vision of empire shared by Locke and Defoe is thus based on and inseparable from a quest for ecological dominion that is global in scope. In the latter part of the essay, I discuss the astounding popularity of the Crusoe story and its status as myth and argue that it constitutes a version of what Carolyn Merchant terms the \"Recovery Narrative,\" which forms \"perhaps the most important mythology that humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.\" Given its influence and enduring popularity, I suggest that we see Robinson Crusoe as a key text and driver of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human activities have altered the planet's land surfaces, oceans, and biosphere and produced the environmental crises that we face today.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"142 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sip.2023.a910769
Steven W. May
Abstract: Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 85 (Ra), and Marsh's Library, Dublin, MS Z 3.5.21 (Ma), are two of the most important anthologies of Elizabethan lyric poetry. We have long known that Ra was compiled at St. John's College, Cambridge, apparently by John Finet. He credits his fellow Johnian, James Reshoulde, with two poems in Ra, one of which is answered by a poem in Ma. Reshoulde is not named in Ma, but the discovery of his handwriting in this miscellany confirms that it, too, was compiled at St. John's and drew upon a common store of in-house and external writings, including poems written by courtiers at the apogee of Elizabethan society. The relationships among these elite texts shed important new light on how lyric poetry circulated in the age's scribal culture and how these practices exerted a democratizing influence on what is generally considered a culture of exclusive coteries.
摘要:牛津大学图书馆,罗尔斯女士。诗人。85 (Ra)和都柏林马什图书馆,MS Z 3.5.21 (Ma)是伊丽莎白时代最重要的两本抒情诗选集。我们早就知道《Ra》是由剑桥大学圣约翰学院编撰的,作者显然是约翰·菲内。他认为他的同道约翰尼亚人詹姆斯·雷舒德(James Reshoulde)在《拉》中写了两首诗,其中一首在《马》中得到了回应。《马记》中没有提到Reshoulde的名字,但在这本杂记中发现的他的笔迹证实,这本杂记也是在圣约翰编纂的,并借鉴了内部和外部的共同作品,包括伊丽莎白社会鼎盛时期朝臣写的诗歌。这些精英文本之间的关系为抒情诗如何在这个时代的抄写文化中流传以及这些做法如何对通常被认为是排外小团体的文化施加民主化影响提供了重要的新视角。
{"title":"James Reshoulde and Elizabethan Scribal Culture","authors":"Steven W. May","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910769","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 85 (Ra), and Marsh's Library, Dublin, MS Z 3.5.21 (Ma), are two of the most important anthologies of Elizabethan lyric poetry. We have long known that Ra was compiled at St. John's College, Cambridge, apparently by John Finet. He credits his fellow Johnian, James Reshoulde, with two poems in Ra, one of which is answered by a poem in Ma. Reshoulde is not named in Ma, but the discovery of his handwriting in this miscellany confirms that it, too, was compiled at St. John's and drew upon a common store of in-house and external writings, including poems written by courtiers at the apogee of Elizabethan society. The relationships among these elite texts shed important new light on how lyric poetry circulated in the age's scribal culture and how these practices exerted a democratizing influence on what is generally considered a culture of exclusive coteries.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sip.2023.a910773
{"title":"Contents of Volume 120","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910773","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/sip.2023.a910770
Ben LaBreche
Abstract: Scholars have often linked John Milton with natural law; this article argues instead for the strong interest of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in legal positivism. By the mid-seventeenth century, thinkers like Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes were in their different ways proposing a natural law based on self-preservation rather than theology, and as a result natural law became increasingly indistinguishable from political defactoism and reason of state. Milton struggled more than is generally recognized with the threat this naturalism posed to free will and moral value, and he responded by anticipating the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers like John Austin, Hans Kelsen, and H. L. A. Hart, who made positivism central to liberal jurisprudence. Positivism asserts legal norms to be based on their authoritative source rather than their conformity with fact or reason, and thus positivist legal theory offers an escape from ethically minimal natural law. Positivism, though, also relies on preexisting, potentially arbitrary authority and makes penal sanctions constitutive of legal order, and these qualities paradoxically bind positivism to the worst features of naturalism: determinism and coercive violence. Milton grapples with precisely these issues in his 1671 poems, and his conflicted embrace of positivism illuminates a number of puzzles long noted in these works.
{"title":"Milton's Legal Duel: Nature and Norm in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes","authors":"Ben LaBreche","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910770","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Scholars have often linked John Milton with natural law; this article argues instead for the strong interest of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in legal positivism. By the mid-seventeenth century, thinkers like Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes were in their different ways proposing a natural law based on self-preservation rather than theology, and as a result natural law became increasingly indistinguishable from political defactoism and reason of state. Milton struggled more than is generally recognized with the threat this naturalism posed to free will and moral value, and he responded by anticipating the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers like John Austin, Hans Kelsen, and H. L. A. Hart, who made positivism central to liberal jurisprudence. Positivism asserts legal norms to be based on their authoritative source rather than their conformity with fact or reason, and thus positivist legal theory offers an escape from ethically minimal natural law. Positivism, though, also relies on preexisting, potentially arbitrary authority and makes penal sanctions constitutive of legal order, and these qualities paradoxically bind positivism to the worst features of naturalism: determinism and coercive violence. Milton grapples with precisely these issues in his 1671 poems, and his conflicted embrace of positivism illuminates a number of puzzles long noted in these works.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}