In Fortune Fair and Foul

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Paula Barros
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Conjugal Love ◽  
Italian Poetry

This article focuses on the idiosyncratic conception of happiness Sir Kenelm Digby develops in the letters he wrote after the death of his wife in 1633. It contextualises Digby’s vision of happiness through an examination of the different traditions he revisits and appropriates to develop his personal and subjective ethics of self-care, mainly Renaissance Neoplatonism, the idealisation of conjugal love, the idealism of Italian poetry, and an ascetic model of widowhood linked to the tradition of spiritual mourning. It analyses how Digby’s conception of happiness, through its vindication of subjectivity and excess, challenges the early modern ethos of consolation and speculates on the reasons that may have led Digby to present his readers with such an extraordinary self-portrait.

The Realist Turn: Parrhêsia, Character and the Limits of Didacticism

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-118
Author(s):  
David Hershinow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
New Development ◽  
Truth Teller

Chapter 2 offers a new account of literary realism and its origins in early modern drama in order to explain why a crisis of character—both literary and ethical—begins to cohere around the figure of the Cynic truth-teller only in the sixteenth century. It argues that the proliferation of non-allegorical characters in early modern drama is the result of a new development in the protocols of literary didacticism, one in which literature can increasingly instruct audiences in the ethics of self-care by offering up to judgment the actions and outcomes of characters fashioned to be verisimilar to people. Moving into the seventeenth century and beyond, literary realism becomes fictionality’s dominant representational mode precisely because it serves as a virtual arena in which to exercise one’s practical wisdom (phronesis) about the ethical means and political ends of action.

Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-630
Author(s):  
Ronald K. Rittgers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Spiritual Self ◽  
Private Devotion ◽  
Artistic Skill ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article seeks to make an original contribution to the study of early modern Christian devotion by examining a source that has received no scholarly attention of any kind: Johannes Christoph Oelhafen'sPious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement(1619). Oelhafen, a prominent Nuremberg lawyer, composed thePious Meditationsshortly after his wife, Anna Maria, died. He did so in order to console himself and his eight children in the midst of their considerable grief. Drawing on well-known rhetorical devices and consolatory remedies, Oelhafen produced a work of private devotion that is remarkable in terms of its rich affectivity and considerable artistic skill. ThePious Meditationswas never published, rather Oelhafen intended it for a private circle of intimates, especially his children and their posterity. The work illustrates especially well the theme of spiritual self-care that was so prominent in early modern Lutheran devotion. ThePious Meditationsalso demonstrates how creative and resourceful early modern Christians could be as they sought to contend with mortality, loss, despair, the obligations of parenthood, and the frequently mysterious workings of providence.

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