Florio's Montaigne and the Tyranny of “Custome”: Appropriation, Ideology, and Early English Readership of theEssayes*

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Hamlin

AbstractEarly English readers of Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) annotated their copies of John Florio's (1553[?]–1625) translation with remarkable frequency and vehemence, creating a context within which printed appropriations of the essayist may be fruitfully examined. No topic intrigued these readers more than custom. Drawing from transcriptions of over 4,000 marginal annotations and situating the Montaignean borrowings of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and other English writers within a culture of active reader response, this essay treats the Montaignean account of custom as a case study wherein differences between manuscript and print appropriation may be investigated. Montaigne's reception in seventeenth-century England cannot be understood without scrupulous attention to both traditions.

Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).


1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Robert W. Poetschke ◽  
George A. Rothrock
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.


Author(s):  
Erin Webster

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.


The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection of essays to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare and dance. Despite recent academic interest in movement, materiality, and the body—and the growth of dance studies as a disciplinary field—Shakespeare’s employment of dance as both a theatrical device and thematic reference point remains under-studied. The reimagining of his writing as dance works is also neglected as a subject for research. Alan Brissenden’s 1981 Shakespeare and the Dance remains the seminal text for those interested in early modern dancing and its appearances within Shakespearean drama, but this new volume provides a single source of reference for dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement.


1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-305
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelie Lemieux ◽  
Nathalie Lacelle

Research on literature pedagogy still refers to traditional, text-oriented methods in practice (Todorov, 1982; Peirce, 1977), with occasional consideration for students’ subjectivity through reader-response exercises involving reading logs, surveys, or journals. When addressing subjectivities in individual and collective classroom contexts, researchers should direct attention towards the strategies students mobilize when reading. Owing to Sauvaire’s (2013) typology of interpretive dimensions in reading, this qualitative case study investigates patterns emerging from students’ written and verbalized expressions of their subjectivities in a 9th-grade literature classroom. The data point to conclusive results explaining pathways for interpretive strategies, which vary in group and individual settings.


2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-606
Author(s):  
Zachary Mcleod Hutchins

Francis Bacon's influence on seventeenth-century New England has long passed unnoticed, but his plan for the restoration of prelapsarian intellectual perfections guided John Winthrop's initial colonization efforts, shaped New England's educational policies, and had an impact on civic and religious leaders from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards.


Letras ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Lavinia Silvares

Nos séculos XVI e XVII, o significado conceitual de “imaginação” atrelava-se sobretudo à teoria aristotélica da phantasia, traduzida como imaginatio, em latim, e amplamente discutida em tratados sobre poesia e retórica. Neste artigo, propõe-se explorar brevemente algumas ideias relativas à especificidade histórica da noção de “imaginação” na poética renascentista, com vistas a evitar as abordagens transistóricas da poesia e de sua interpretação. Para tanto, serão comentados trechos específicos dos tratados The Defense of Poetry (1595), de Philip Sidney, Advancement of Learning (1605), de Francis Bacon, bem como algumas passagens das obras de William Shakespeare.


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