The Political Atheology of George Puttenham and Fulke Greville

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan John Guagliardo
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Irish

This chapter argues that Fulke Greville’s long career of royal service, and many of the literary texts that he created, were shaped by two Elizabethan court luminaries: Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Through biographical and literary analysis, I trace the political and intellectual influence of both Sidney and Essex on Greville’s career at court, with special attention to how the Sidney/Essex circle’s famed interest in Senecan neostoicism and Tacitean historiography manifest in Greville’s life and works. Though Greville outlived his former patrons by decades, it is his experience with them in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign that moulded his courtly outlook in the seventeenth century.


Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield

This chapter provides an overview of Greville’s political poetry, arguing that his work has to be understood as part of a tradition of writing which aimed to explore the relationship between the Crown and the people, expressing ideas in pithy, memorable maxims. Greville explores the rights and duties of rulers and ruled throughout his political works, most significantly, Mustapha and A Treatise of Monarchy, works which recall earlier political poetry such as A Mirror for Magistrates and the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. Greville emerges as a figure always interested in imagining a truly balanced constitution in which the monarch and the people cooperate and respect each other: accordingly, his most forceful criticism was aimed at what he saw as the encroaching power of the state in the seventeenth century.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Darren Kew

In many respects, the least important part of the 1999 elections were the elections themselves. From the beginning of General Abdusalam Abubakar’s transition program in mid-1998, most Nigerians who were not part of the wealthy “political class” of elites—which is to say, most Nigerians— adopted their usual politically savvy perspective of siddon look (sit and look). They waited with cautious optimism to see what sort of new arrangement the military would allow the civilian politicians to struggle over, and what in turn the civilians would offer the public. No one had any illusions that anything but high-stakes bargaining within the military and the political class would determine the structures of power in the civilian government. Elections would influence this process to the extent that the crowd influences a soccer match.


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