{"title":"Barry Gaines AND Grace Ioppolo (eds). The Collected Works of Thomas Heywood, Volume 3: Middle Plays","authors":"C. Coffin","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad070","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42736326","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}
Ælfric of Eynsham’s Old English homily on the biblical books of Maccabees is a crucial text in the intellectual history of later Anglo-Saxon England, containing the only discussion of ‘just war’ in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the earliest attestation to the ‘Three Orders of Society’. It is now generally understood that Ælfric was writing for a predominantly lay audience, exhorting them to take up arms against the Vikings. This becomes particularly apparent from a close examination of Ælfric’s deviations from, and emendations to, the Vulgate, not all of which have hitherto been noticed. After supplementing this literary analysis with new observations, this article attempts to delineate the historical implications of this interpretation of the text. Once placed within its historical context, Ælfric’s Maccabees appears as a sharp critique of the direction of royal policy under Æthelred the Unready during the 990s, especially the payment of tribute to the Vikings and their conscription as mercenaries. This invites us to reconsider both Ælfric’s own intellectual trajectory and the court politics of Anglo-Saxon England in the final years of the first millennium.
{"title":"The Politics of Ælfric’s Maccabees","authors":"S. Rubinstein","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad066","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Ælfric of Eynsham’s Old English homily on the biblical books of Maccabees is a crucial text in the intellectual history of later Anglo-Saxon England, containing the only discussion of ‘just war’ in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the earliest attestation to the ‘Three Orders of Society’. It is now generally understood that Ælfric was writing for a predominantly lay audience, exhorting them to take up arms against the Vikings. This becomes particularly apparent from a close examination of Ælfric’s deviations from, and emendations to, the Vulgate, not all of which have hitherto been noticed. After supplementing this literary analysis with new observations, this article attempts to delineate the historical implications of this interpretation of the text. Once placed within its historical context, Ælfric’s Maccabees appears as a sharp critique of the direction of royal policy under Æthelred the Unready during the 990s, especially the payment of tribute to the Vikings and their conscription as mercenaries. This invites us to reconsider both Ælfric’s own intellectual trajectory and the court politics of Anglo-Saxon England in the final years of the first millennium.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48927910","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 challenges prevailing interpretations of Amy Dorrit’s petiteness as a symbol of her abstemious self-sacrifice or of women’s infantilized position in Victorian culture. Examining Little Dorrit literally rather than symptomatically shows that Charles Dickens highlights the protagonist Amy’s small size on a spectrum of human variation, rendering in detail corporeal experiences in a physical world built for taller people. While the plentiful critical readings interpreting Amy as symbolic are illuminating, they depend on the unreliable points of view of other characters. Aware of others’ misperception of her in contrast to her understanding of herself, Amy develops a painful double consciousness that nonetheless gives her a capacity to see from more than one viewpoint. Shifting readers away from seeing Amy through the eyes of her misperceiving friends and family, Dickens critiques symptomatic reading and links Amy’s compassionate capacity for comprehending multiple perspectives to the omniscient narrator’s expansive point of view.
{"title":"The Littleness of Little Dorrit","authors":"S. Weltman","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad061","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay challenges prevailing interpretations of Amy Dorrit’s petiteness as a symbol of her abstemious self-sacrifice or of women’s infantilized position in Victorian culture. Examining Little Dorrit literally rather than symptomatically shows that Charles Dickens highlights the protagonist Amy’s small size on a spectrum of human variation, rendering in detail corporeal experiences in a physical world built for taller people. While the plentiful critical readings interpreting Amy as symbolic are illuminating, they depend on the unreliable points of view of other characters. Aware of others’ misperception of her in contrast to her understanding of herself, Amy develops a painful double consciousness that nonetheless gives her a capacity to see from more than one viewpoint. Shifting readers away from seeing Amy through the eyes of her misperceiving friends and family, Dickens critiques symptomatic reading and links Amy’s compassionate capacity for comprehending multiple perspectives to the omniscient narrator’s expansive point of view.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46032117","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}
{"title":"Steven Rozenski. Wisdom’s Journey: Continental Mysticism and Popular Devotion in England, 1350–1650","authors":"Jennifer N. Brown","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad063","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48437349","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 article considers some of the military and diplomatic contexts which have been neglected in the study of eighteenth-century mock-heroic literature, with a particular focus on the early satires of Swift. Typically, mock-heroic literature is seen as a skilful exercise in a particular kind of literary style, and individual mock-heroic satires are usually contextualized by setting them alongside the military epics (e.g., the Iliad or Aeneid) which they seem to parody. This article takes a slightly different approach by setting Swift’s mock-heroic satires against the background of the Grand Alliance wars against Louis XIV (1688–1714), and by taking another look at his relationship with the retired diplomat and ambassador Sir William Temple. As will be discussed, Temple’s essay ‘Of Heroic Virtue’ offered Swift a model of civil heroism which could be defended or advocated in satire, and it is the influence on Swift of the period’s diplomatic, political, and legal writings which will occupy the core of this discussion.
{"title":"Swift’s War and Peace","authors":"Dan Sperrin","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad060","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers some of the military and diplomatic contexts which have been neglected in the study of eighteenth-century mock-heroic literature, with a particular focus on the early satires of Swift. Typically, mock-heroic literature is seen as a skilful exercise in a particular kind of literary style, and individual mock-heroic satires are usually contextualized by setting them alongside the military epics (e.g., the Iliad or Aeneid) which they seem to parody. This article takes a slightly different approach by setting Swift’s mock-heroic satires against the background of the Grand Alliance wars against Louis XIV (1688–1714), and by taking another look at his relationship with the retired diplomat and ambassador Sir William Temple. As will be discussed, Temple’s essay ‘Of Heroic Virtue’ offered Swift a model of civil heroism which could be defended or advocated in satire, and it is the influence on Swift of the period’s diplomatic, political, and legal writings which will occupy the core of this discussion.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43446585","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}
Robert Burns’s song editor George Thomson (1757–1851) issued the poet’s cantata ‘Love and Liberty’, also known as ‘The Jolly Beggars’, for the first time with music in 1818 (a setting of Burns’s text for narrator, solo singers, choir, and piano trio). The musical score was by London theatre composer Sir Henry Bishop and the text was edited by Thomson in line with his strict policy of decency and politeness. This essay tracks Thomson’s editorial curation of Burns’s text in the context of polite ‘improvement’ and argues that while pursuing apparent ‘decorum’, Thomson’s treatment struggles to negotiate the unruliness at the centre of what is now considered one of Burns’s most important works. The article pays particular attention to the complicated publication history of this work, revealing a chronology of popular print editions in advance of Thomson’s own, as well as the notable influence of Walter Scott’s remarks on the piece in the Quarterly Review. Examining the musical context of Thomson’s ‘Jolly Beggars’ alongside the text reveals a similar aspiration for elevation and the article presents the conversation between Thomson and Bishop, from manuscript correspondence.
罗伯特·伯恩斯的歌曲编辑乔治·汤姆森(1757-1851)于1818年首次发行了诗人的康塔塔“爱与自由”,也被称为“快乐的乞丐”(伯恩斯的文本设置为旁白,独奏歌手,合唱团和钢琴三重奏)。配乐是由伦敦戏剧作曲家亨利·毕晓普爵士(Sir Henry Bishop)创作的,剧本是由汤姆森根据他严格的礼貌原则编辑的。这篇文章追踪了汤姆森在礼貌“改进”的背景下对伯恩斯文本的编辑整理,并认为在追求明显的“礼仪”的同时,汤姆森的处理努力与伯恩斯最重要的作品之一的中心的蛮横进行协商。这篇文章特别关注了这部作品复杂的出版历史,揭示了在汤姆森自己之前流行的印刷版的年表,以及沃尔特·斯科特在《季度评论》上对这部作品的评论的显著影响。检查汤姆逊的“快乐的乞丐”的音乐背景旁边的文本揭示了类似的渴望提升和文章提出汤姆逊和主教之间的对话,从手稿通信。
{"title":"‘Cant About Decorum’: George Thomson’s Singular Edition of Robert Burns’s ‘The Jolly Beggars’","authors":"K. McCue, G. McKeever","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad058","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Robert Burns’s song editor George Thomson (1757–1851) issued the poet’s cantata ‘Love and Liberty’, also known as ‘The Jolly Beggars’, for the first time with music in 1818 (a setting of Burns’s text for narrator, solo singers, choir, and piano trio). The musical score was by London theatre composer Sir Henry Bishop and the text was edited by Thomson in line with his strict policy of decency and politeness. This essay tracks Thomson’s editorial curation of Burns’s text in the context of polite ‘improvement’ and argues that while pursuing apparent ‘decorum’, Thomson’s treatment struggles to negotiate the unruliness at the centre of what is now considered one of Burns’s most important works. The article pays particular attention to the complicated publication history of this work, revealing a chronology of popular print editions in advance of Thomson’s own, as well as the notable influence of Walter Scott’s remarks on the piece in the Quarterly Review. Examining the musical context of Thomson’s ‘Jolly Beggars’ alongside the text reveals a similar aspiration for elevation and the article presents the conversation between Thomson and Bishop, from manuscript correspondence.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46343227","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}
Long treated as a poetic curio or a biographical riddle, Shakespeare’s poetic contribution to the 1601 Loves Martyr—usually known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’—has recently been reclaimed as an experiment in metaphysical poetry. This essay sets out to ask what that means: for the poem, for metaphysical poetry, and for metaphysics itself. It argues that Shakespeare draws on the language of metaphysics, and its canonical problems, to test the relationship between poetic and philosophical thinking. It follows the poem as it charts the efforts, and failures, of both allegory and metaphysics to apprehend the thought-defying love between phoenix and turtle. It shows how that love engages the dilemma of the particular and the universal, a dilemma native to metaphysics since Aristotle, but felt most acutely in the realm of aesthetic experience. And it suggests that, in sounding out the limits of metaphysical reason, Shakespeare’s poem allows for poetry to think in a way that metaphysics cannot. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ ends in mourning: for the death of phoenix and turtle, and for the demise of the metaphysical transcendentals they seemed in hindsight to uphold. That mourning might nonetheless offer poetry its vocation, as the space where reason might remember and reflect on the object of its loss.
{"title":"Shakespeare’s Metaphysical Poem: Allegory, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’","authors":"T. Tregear","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad055","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Long treated as a poetic curio or a biographical riddle, Shakespeare’s poetic contribution to the 1601 Loves Martyr—usually known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’—has recently been reclaimed as an experiment in metaphysical poetry. This essay sets out to ask what that means: for the poem, for metaphysical poetry, and for metaphysics itself. It argues that Shakespeare draws on the language of metaphysics, and its canonical problems, to test the relationship between poetic and philosophical thinking. It follows the poem as it charts the efforts, and failures, of both allegory and metaphysics to apprehend the thought-defying love between phoenix and turtle. It shows how that love engages the dilemma of the particular and the universal, a dilemma native to metaphysics since Aristotle, but felt most acutely in the realm of aesthetic experience. And it suggests that, in sounding out the limits of metaphysical reason, Shakespeare’s poem allows for poetry to think in a way that metaphysics cannot. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ ends in mourning: for the death of phoenix and turtle, and for the demise of the metaphysical transcendentals they seemed in hindsight to uphold. That mourning might nonetheless offer poetry its vocation, as the space where reason might remember and reflect on the object of its loss.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46675397","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}
Galen’s reception in Renaissance literature is usually studied as the reception of Galenic anatomy or humoral physiology, rather than the reception of actual texts that Galen wrote. Revising that orthodoxy, this article analyses fragmentary vernacular translations from Galen’s works by Thomas Elyot, many of which are filtered through intermediary Latin translations by Thomas Linacre. This approach foregrounds the often highly literary nature of Galen’s treatises, as well as the extent to which Elyot responds to Galen with a concern for style as well as content. The results contribute to scholarship on Greek translation in sixteenth-century England, which to date has neglected scientific works. New conclusions are also reached about the scale and nature of Linacre’s early Tudor reception. Ultimately, Elyot’s Galen translations shed new light on the burgeoning status of English as a classically validated language in the sixteenth century, and offer a case study in the value of linking medical humanities with scholarship in translation studies and classical reception.
{"title":"Thomas Elyot and the Translation of Galen","authors":"J. Colley","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad059","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Galen’s reception in Renaissance literature is usually studied as the reception of Galenic anatomy or humoral physiology, rather than the reception of actual texts that Galen wrote. Revising that orthodoxy, this article analyses fragmentary vernacular translations from Galen’s works by Thomas Elyot, many of which are filtered through intermediary Latin translations by Thomas Linacre. This approach foregrounds the often highly literary nature of Galen’s treatises, as well as the extent to which Elyot responds to Galen with a concern for style as well as content. The results contribute to scholarship on Greek translation in sixteenth-century England, which to date has neglected scientific works. New conclusions are also reached about the scale and nature of Linacre’s early Tudor reception. Ultimately, Elyot’s Galen translations shed new light on the burgeoning status of English as a classically validated language in the sixteenth century, and offer a case study in the value of linking medical humanities with scholarship in translation studies and classical reception.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47682992","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 article explores datasets curated from the citation evidence in successive editions and revisions of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884–2022), which have been annotated to reflect the gender of the authors and other bibliographical metadata. This exploration aims both to supplement the historical account of the dictionary’s uses of female-authored quotation sources, correcting and elaborating some figures which have previously been reported, and to provide a contemporary account of women’s representation in OED Online, using the revision published in June 2022. In seeking to establish a more objective and empirical basis for judging ‘representativeness’, I treat the OED both as a self-contained bibliographical and lexicographical work, and comparatively, against other comprehensive or very large bibliographical corpora, namely the Garside et al. surveys of early English novels, the Library of Congress Catalog, and the HathiTrust Digital Library. The OED data studied here represents a significant (if restricted) subset, rather than a representative sample, of the OED corpus as a whole: modern (post-1700) quotations from books appearing with their author’s name in the OED evidence are considered. While this approach does not claim to make an objectively complete tally of every woman-authored quotation collected in the OED, it does enable a more detailed and accurate account than has previously been possible, and allows for a number of consistent cross-comparisons. A companion document of Supplementary Data & Notes, available at The Review of English Studies online, describes in technical terms how the data was compiled and the processes and principles by which it was annotated.
{"title":"Women’s Words and the Words of Women in the Oxford English Dictionary","authors":"David-Antoine Williams","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad052","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores datasets curated from the citation evidence in successive editions and revisions of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884–2022), which have been annotated to reflect the gender of the authors and other bibliographical metadata. This exploration aims both to supplement the historical account of the dictionary’s uses of female-authored quotation sources, correcting and elaborating some figures which have previously been reported, and to provide a contemporary account of women’s representation in OED Online, using the revision published in June 2022. In seeking to establish a more objective and empirical basis for judging ‘representativeness’, I treat the OED both as a self-contained bibliographical and lexicographical work, and comparatively, against other comprehensive or very large bibliographical corpora, namely the Garside et al. surveys of early English novels, the Library of Congress Catalog, and the HathiTrust Digital Library. The OED data studied here represents a significant (if restricted) subset, rather than a representative sample, of the OED corpus as a whole: modern (post-1700) quotations from books appearing with their author’s name in the OED evidence are considered. While this approach does not claim to make an objectively complete tally of every woman-authored quotation collected in the OED, it does enable a more detailed and accurate account than has previously been possible, and allows for a number of consistent cross-comparisons. A companion document of Supplementary Data & Notes, available at The Review of English Studies online, describes in technical terms how the data was compiled and the processes and principles by which it was annotated.","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42806087","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}
{"title":"Melvyn New AND Anthony W Lee (eds). Notes on Footnotes: Annotating Eighteenth-Century Literature","authors":"Thomas Keymer","doi":"10.1093/res/hgad056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad056","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46496,"journal":{"name":"REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42714384","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}