Abstract:This essay traces how Francis Bacon's late-career observational methods and poetics of natural history in the Preparation for an Experimental and Natural History (1620) evolve from the more imaginative poetics of the Advancement of Learning (1605). In enacting his project, Bacon recognized and sought to balance the tensions between flattering fictions and empiricism and, as a way of mediating between them, imagination and sensory experience. Bacon's late-career poetics attempts to control narrative and desire by restraining the imagination and making language and matter indistinguishable to the point that his written natural history "is used as the primary matter of philosophy, and the basic stuff and raw material of true induction." The resulting elision of thought, writing, and matter compels him to abandon the Advancement's myth of Orpheus taming the beasts and humanist tropes like the Erasmian treasure house of speech to describe his Great Instauration's impacts on civilization. Bacon's unrealized ideal is to free the natural philosopher to move seamlessly from written natural history to action without imaginative mediation. However, he cannot abandon fiction as a means of mythologizing his project for readers even as he seeks to excise all vestiges of the imagination from his poetics of natural history.
{"title":"The Garden, the Granary, and \"the basic stuff and raw material of true induction\": The Eclipse of the Imagination in Francis Bacon's Poetics of Natural History","authors":"Adam Neff","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay traces how Francis Bacon's late-career observational methods and poetics of natural history in the Preparation for an Experimental and Natural History (1620) evolve from the more imaginative poetics of the Advancement of Learning (1605). In enacting his project, Bacon recognized and sought to balance the tensions between flattering fictions and empiricism and, as a way of mediating between them, imagination and sensory experience. Bacon's late-career poetics attempts to control narrative and desire by restraining the imagination and making language and matter indistinguishable to the point that his written natural history \"is used as the primary matter of philosophy, and the basic stuff and raw material of true induction.\" The resulting elision of thought, writing, and matter compels him to abandon the Advancement's myth of Orpheus taming the beasts and humanist tropes like the Erasmian treasure house of speech to describe his Great Instauration's impacts on civilization. Bacon's unrealized ideal is to free the natural philosopher to move seamlessly from written natural history to action without imaginative mediation. However, he cannot abandon fiction as a means of mythologizing his project for readers even as he seeks to excise all vestiges of the imagination from his poetics of natural history.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43664410","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}
Abstract:Though usually construed in terms of defective or recalcitrant agency (not doing what should be done), Hamlet's delay can be freshly illumined by considering it in terms of patiency: the liability to be affected in various ways. Like the Ghost, Hamlet's patiency involves a process of purgation—not of sin, as with the Ghost, but of a way of thinking. The purgative process is challenged by the penetrative violence of a countervailing process—the speech of others, whose words, entering the ears of auditors like the poison poured into the ear of the sleeping King, profoundly influence and disrupt their thoughts. The purgation of Hamlet involves a multistage development whereby new cognitive characteristics displace or coexist alongside old ones, in one of the most subtle, elusive, and consequential mental evolutions depicted in drama. Highlights of this essay's explication include (a) the motif of the secondary ghost, (b) the striking interrelationships between the scene in Ophelia's closet and the narrated scene aboard the ship bound for England, (c) the removal of the arras that the revenge morality hangs between act and consequence, and (d) the recasting of the notion of agency such that inaction, not action, facilitates the achievement of the agent's ends.
{"title":"Acting and Being Acted Upon: Hamlet's Delay, the Secondary Ghost, and the Purgation of Agency and Patiency","authors":"E. Levy","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Though usually construed in terms of defective or recalcitrant agency (not doing what should be done), Hamlet's delay can be freshly illumined by considering it in terms of patiency: the liability to be affected in various ways. Like the Ghost, Hamlet's patiency involves a process of purgation—not of sin, as with the Ghost, but of a way of thinking. The purgative process is challenged by the penetrative violence of a countervailing process—the speech of others, whose words, entering the ears of auditors like the poison poured into the ear of the sleeping King, profoundly influence and disrupt their thoughts. The purgation of Hamlet involves a multistage development whereby new cognitive characteristics displace or coexist alongside old ones, in one of the most subtle, elusive, and consequential mental evolutions depicted in drama. Highlights of this essay's explication include (a) the motif of the secondary ghost, (b) the striking interrelationships between the scene in Ophelia's closet and the narrated scene aboard the ship bound for England, (c) the removal of the arras that the revenge morality hangs between act and consequence, and (d) the recasting of the notion of agency such that inaction, not action, facilitates the achievement of the agent's ends.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46368131","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}
Abstract:In this article, I read book 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene in conversation with native English didactic and behavioral manuals as I explore the relationship between literary genre and Spenserian courtesy. I argue that Spenser uses Virgilian georgic motifs to transcribe into the idiom of literary genre the courtesy texts' argument that nobility requires the labor of self-cultivation in a postlapsarian world.
{"title":"The Problem of Genre and Spenserian Courtesy: Virgilian Georgic in The Faerie Queene Book 6","authors":"Caralyn Bialo","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I read book 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene in conversation with native English didactic and behavioral manuals as I explore the relationship between literary genre and Spenserian courtesy. I argue that Spenser uses Virgilian georgic motifs to transcribe into the idiom of literary genre the courtesy texts' argument that nobility requires the labor of self-cultivation in a postlapsarian world.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44886499","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}
Abstract:It has long been acknowledged that Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is indebted to the book of Revelation. What has not been recognized, however, is that one of the forms in which Spenser most likely encountered Revelation was illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts created in England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. These manuscripts hold many surprising correspondences with book 1 of The Faerie Queene: the translation of Revelation into vernacular poetry; the depiction of red-cross knights fighting dragons alongside wimpled ladies offering encouragement; the recasting of Revelation as romance adventure or hagiography; the association of Apocalyptic events with the English monarchy; and a moralized reading of Revelation that interprets this scriptural book less as historical prophecy and more as a guide for the pious Christian navigating the snares of this world. This essay examines these resonances between the medieval Apocalypses and The Faerie Queene, identifying nine manuscripts that were plausibly accessible to Spenser prior to his departure for Ireland in 1580. Reminding ourselves of the continued use of these medieval books both enriches our understanding of Spenser's aims and serves as a case study in the medievalism of early modern England.
{"title":"Illuminating Redcrosse's Way: Medieval Apocalypse Manuscripts as Sources for Spenser's Faerie Queene","authors":"K. Gross","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:It has long been acknowledged that Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is indebted to the book of Revelation. What has not been recognized, however, is that one of the forms in which Spenser most likely encountered Revelation was illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts created in England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. These manuscripts hold many surprising correspondences with book 1 of The Faerie Queene: the translation of Revelation into vernacular poetry; the depiction of red-cross knights fighting dragons alongside wimpled ladies offering encouragement; the recasting of Revelation as romance adventure or hagiography; the association of Apocalyptic events with the English monarchy; and a moralized reading of Revelation that interprets this scriptural book less as historical prophecy and more as a guide for the pious Christian navigating the snares of this world. This essay examines these resonances between the medieval Apocalypses and The Faerie Queene, identifying nine manuscripts that were plausibly accessible to Spenser prior to his departure for Ireland in 1580. Reminding ourselves of the continued use of these medieval books both enriches our understanding of Spenser's aims and serves as a case study in the medievalism of early modern England.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42872147","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}
{"title":"Editor's Note: Louis Round Wilson Prize for 2021","authors":"Reid Barbour","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45324647","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}
Abstract:For medieval authors and modern scholars alike, the twelfth-century legend of the Head of Satalia represents something of a curious aberration. Retold and reimagined in many different literary contexts over several centuries, this etiological narrative of necrophilia, monstrosity, and supernatural destruction inhabits and exposes the overlap between multiple genres of medieval writing. But despite its uncertain origin and generic flexibility, the Satalia legend of the late medieval textual record owes much to the themes, motifs, and structural expectations of chivalric romance. This article examines and compares all known branches of the medieval legend for the first time, charting its development and arguing that the Head of Satalia represents a subversive, self-critical romance tradition much adapted by its inheritors.
{"title":"The Head of Satalia: A Romance Monstrously Birthed","authors":"Joel Lipson","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:For medieval authors and modern scholars alike, the twelfth-century legend of the Head of Satalia represents something of a curious aberration. Retold and reimagined in many different literary contexts over several centuries, this etiological narrative of necrophilia, monstrosity, and supernatural destruction inhabits and exposes the overlap between multiple genres of medieval writing. But despite its uncertain origin and generic flexibility, the Satalia legend of the late medieval textual record owes much to the themes, motifs, and structural expectations of chivalric romance. This article examines and compares all known branches of the medieval legend for the first time, charting its development and arguing that the Head of Satalia represents a subversive, self-critical romance tradition much adapted by its inheritors.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49233908","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}
Abstract:Much has been written about traditional themes in Old English verse, but specifically Christian themes have not been discussed. The present essay provides a framework for analyzing Old English religious themes—distinguishing them from the topoi traced by source studies—and then applies this to a theme I call "The Open Heavens." This theme occurs a total of seven times in four Old English poems. Scholarship has traditionally linked three of these texts—Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A—with the Cynewulf group. I argue that the formulas and themes shared by the Cynewulfian poems witness a common poetic sociolect, a tradition within the tradition. Cynewulf is the most important author working within this subtradition, but, as this study of "The Open Heavens" theme illustrates, he did not originate it. While Cynewulf's works show a familiarity with the theme, they do not contain a clear-cut instance of it; thus, Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A cannot have derived "The Open Heavens" from him. Other Christian themes await discovery, and, like "The Open Heavens," these have much to tell us about the development of the Old English poetic tradition.
{"title":"Christian Traditional Themes and the Cynewulfian Sociolect in Old English Verse","authors":"Paul Battles","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Much has been written about traditional themes in Old English verse, but specifically Christian themes have not been discussed. The present essay provides a framework for analyzing Old English religious themes—distinguishing them from the topoi traced by source studies—and then applies this to a theme I call \"The Open Heavens.\" This theme occurs a total of seven times in four Old English poems. Scholarship has traditionally linked three of these texts—Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A—with the Cynewulf group. I argue that the formulas and themes shared by the Cynewulfian poems witness a common poetic sociolect, a tradition within the tradition. Cynewulf is the most important author working within this subtradition, but, as this study of \"The Open Heavens\" theme illustrates, he did not originate it. While Cynewulf's works show a familiarity with the theme, they do not contain a clear-cut instance of it; thus, Andreas, Christ and Satan, and Guthlac A cannot have derived \"The Open Heavens\" from him. Other Christian themes await discovery, and, like \"The Open Heavens,\" these have much to tell us about the development of the Old English poetic tradition.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43168069","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}
Abstract:Archival traces of the manuscript culture in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, composed their work can yield information available nowhere else about their literary and personal connections. Evidence of Finch's and Montagu's personal and literary links—their socioliterary intercourse (a term I borrow from Arthur Marotti)—lies in the manuscripts preserved in Montagu's papers at Sandon Hall, Staffordshire. This evidence establishes not only that Montagu and Finch probably knew each other but also that they certainly participated in a manuscript network that gave rise to specific cases of literary influence. This analysis of material-textual evidence, intertextual phenomena, and the biographical links so characteristic of manuscript culture aims to augment our understanding of Montagu and Finch in the interstices of biographical and literary-textual questions.
{"title":"Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Anne Finch","authors":"J. Keith","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Archival traces of the manuscript culture in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, composed their work can yield information available nowhere else about their literary and personal connections. Evidence of Finch's and Montagu's personal and literary links—their socioliterary intercourse (a term I borrow from Arthur Marotti)—lies in the manuscripts preserved in Montagu's papers at Sandon Hall, Staffordshire. This evidence establishes not only that Montagu and Finch probably knew each other but also that they certainly participated in a manuscript network that gave rise to specific cases of literary influence. This analysis of material-textual evidence, intertextual phenomena, and the biographical links so characteristic of manuscript culture aims to augment our understanding of Montagu and Finch in the interstices of biographical and literary-textual questions.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46695608","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}
Abstract:At the turn of the seventeenth century, Robert Peterson, an attorney working at the heart of Elizabethan government, translated one of the most detailed works on free speech to have emerged from the early modern era: Claudio Tolomei's treatise on "la libertà del parlare." Drawing on sources ancient and contemporary, Tolomei puts forward a rich and wide-ranging account of free speech and its implications for the prince and the smooth operation of government. This article offers the first analysis of Peterson's manuscript translation of Tolomei, locating it among the most important legislative trends concerning free speech in late Elizabethan England.
{"title":"\"Scandalous Speech and Slanderous Libelles\": Robert Peterson, Claudio Tolomei, and the Translation of Free Speech in Early Modern England","authors":"John-Mark Philo","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:At the turn of the seventeenth century, Robert Peterson, an attorney working at the heart of Elizabethan government, translated one of the most detailed works on free speech to have emerged from the early modern era: Claudio Tolomei's treatise on \"la libertà del parlare.\" Drawing on sources ancient and contemporary, Tolomei puts forward a rich and wide-ranging account of free speech and its implications for the prince and the smooth operation of government. This article offers the first analysis of Peterson's manuscript translation of Tolomei, locating it among the most important legislative trends concerning free speech in late Elizabethan England.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44107688","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}
Abstract:Gerard Legh's Accedens of Armory (1562) teaches its readers how to use heraldry to identify men and their families accurately and to assess their characters justly. Near the end of his book, Legh presents an elaborate allegory of a hall of honor which borrows from Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure and Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame. While Chaucer supplies the dream vision structure of Legh's allegory (i.e., a series of three scenes that explore the relationship between honor and fame and the herald's role in identifying and promoting the honorable armigerous man), Legh also consistently argues against Chaucer's position that fame is unrelated to deserving. Those knowledgeable in heraldic lore, Legh argues, are able to assess and represent a man's character directly and deservedly through arms, thus justifying his project of articulating the symbolic significance of armorial design.
摘要:杰拉德·莱格(Gerard Legh)的《军械库附录》(Accedens of Armory, 1562)教导读者如何利用纹章学准确识别男性及其家族,公正地评价他们的性格。在书的最后,莱格借用了斯蒂芬·霍斯的《欢愉的消遣》和杰弗里·乔叟的《名人堂》,对荣誉殿堂进行了精心的比喻。虽然乔叟为莱格的寓言提供了梦幻般的视觉结构(即一系列三个场景,探索荣誉与名声之间的关系,以及传令者在识别和促进可敬的勇士方面的作用),但莱格也一直反对乔叟的立场,即名声与应得无关。Legh认为,那些精通纹章学的人,能够通过纹章来直接、恰当地评估和表现一个人的性格,从而证明了他阐明纹章设计的象征意义的计划是正确的。
{"title":"The Hall of Honor: Chaucer, Hawes, and the Conclusion to Gerard Legh's Accedens of Armory","authors":"R. Moll","doi":"10.1353/sip.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Gerard Legh's Accedens of Armory (1562) teaches its readers how to use heraldry to identify men and their families accurately and to assess their characters justly. Near the end of his book, Legh presents an elaborate allegory of a hall of honor which borrows from Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure and Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame. While Chaucer supplies the dream vision structure of Legh's allegory (i.e., a series of three scenes that explore the relationship between honor and fame and the herald's role in identifying and promoting the honorable armigerous man), Legh also consistently argues against Chaucer's position that fame is unrelated to deserving. Those knowledgeable in heraldic lore, Legh argues, are able to assess and represent a man's character directly and deservedly through arms, thus justifying his project of articulating the symbolic significance of armorial design.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48098792","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}