Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal.

1996 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 1162
Author(s):  
Dilwyn Knox ◽  
Peter Auski
Keyword(s):  
Plain Style ◽  
Spiritual Ideal

"Plain and Vulgarly Express'd": Margaret Cavendish and the Discourse of the New Science

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Nate
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
New Science ◽  
Plain Style ◽  
Thomas Sprat

Although Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), did not belong to the scientific community which after 1660 formed itself around the Royal Society, several of the philosophical issues discussed there are reflected in her writings. Lengthy reflections on language and style which run through her philosophical worksprovide evidence that the linguistic and rhetorical debates of the early Royal Society also left their mark. The isolation which Cavendish faced as a woman writer obliged her to discuss problems of terminology and style even more intensively, thereby adhering to the rhetorical principle of perspicuity which Thomas Sprat demanded in his proposal for a scientific plain style. The influence of the New Science on Cavendish's work becomes obvious when her later writings are compared to her earlier ones where traces of a courtly and more elitist understanding of style can still be found. In this paper the development of Cavendish's stylistic attitudes is traced in several of her works, including her Utopian narrative The Blazing World (1666).

Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 725-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackson I. Cope
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Skeletal Structure ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
William Penn ◽  
The North ◽  
Plain Style ◽  
George Fox

The Early Quakers, who liked to call themselves the First Publishers of Truth, swept from the north of England across the nations roughly between 1650 and 1675. And during this same quarter century what we have dubiously labelled “plain” style manifestly supplanted the highly-ornate, rhetorical tradition of English prose which had burgeoned in extravagances of Arcadian rhetoric and Euphuism to flower in the earlier seventeenth century's “Senecan amble.” Clearly, rhetorical analysis can tell us much about the skeletal structure of prose style even in the later years of the century, but it can no longer lay open the center of energy-informing expression, as it can in much earlier prose. The aim of this essay will be to discover those bedrock aspects of expression which are demonstrably homologous with the profoundest conception of life shared by the first Quakers, the most feared and fastest-growing sect of the later seventeenth century, as well as the religious body most neglected by modern students of prose form. The rise of the new “plain” prose has been attributed to the heightened philosophic interest in scepticism, with its pragmatic theories of action; to the intensified interest in empirical science which centered in the Royal Society; and to the rise of a semi-t educated bourgeoisie. But these decades in England's story were characterized most widely by continuous theological debate and exhortations So it would seem probable, granting the convergence of several streams of cause, that the peak swell on which the new prose tradition rode to dominance can most intelligibly be traced to an ultimately theological tide. The literature of early Quakerism is of unparalleled value in testing and illustrating this hypothesis because—with the incalculable human distance between George Fox and William Penn—this evangelistic group cut across all social and educational distinctions, even dimmed the dualism in the rôles of the sexes. Yet when the Quakers pour forth their heart's belief and hope, they do so again and again in the same modes of expression, modes only approximately and infrequently appearing in the sermons and tracts of non-Quaker contemporaries like Everard and Saltmarsh. These characteristics, explained by and explaining the earliest Quaker faith, I should like to call seventeenth-century Quaker style.

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