scholarly journals “Thou liv’st to all that Read”: Reading the Paratext of William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With other Poems (1651) as Early Modern Life Writing

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. VC1-VC18
Author(s):  
Sarah Herbe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Modern Life

This essay proposes to read the paratext of books published in seventeenth-century as a form of multi-perspective, multi-generic, and multi-modal of life writing, since information on the author is not only provided in chronological “Life of the Author” narratives, but by all elements of the paratext. Drawing on the paratext of William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With other Poems, published posthumously in 1651, it is shown how conventional paratextual strategies are combined with individualising “biographemes” (R. Barthes) to create a multi-faceted presentation of the author, in which the reader’s role to reconstruct the author’s life emerges as central. This article was submitted on June 1st 2014 and published on November 3rd 2014

scholarly journals Childhood and Loss in Early Modern Life Writing

Parergon ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgkin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Modern Life

Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Negotiated Interaction ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
Sentient Beings

What were people's feelings about and towards the animals who worked with them in early modern England? What meaning did those animals have? These questions are the starting point for this book. Current historical analyses tell us how important animals were to the development of the economy and to the process of industrialization, but thus far little has been written recognizing the crucial fact that animals are, and always have been, more than simply stock: they are living, sentient beings with whom negotiated interaction is required. This book will take such interactions as its focus and will return animals to the central place they had in the domestic environments of so many in the early seventeenth century, thus tracking a lost aspect of early modern life: the importance of the day-to-day relationships between humans and the animals they worked with.

Ancient Biography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 574-585
Author(s):  
Enrica Zanin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
Historical Reliability ◽  
Philosophical Biography

This chapter examines presences of ancient biography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The popularity of biography in seventeenth-century Europe was mainly due to the numerous translations of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Conversely, Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars were extremely influential in the early modern period, was less read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meanwhile, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers contributed to the rise of literary and philosophical biography. However, the more life-writing is considered as a literary practice, the less its historical reliability is valued. If, in the seventeenth century, Lives were generally regarded as a historical genre, eighteenth-century philosophers criticized the historical interest of biography, at a time in which history began to be studied as a science more than as a pedagogical device.

scholarly journals Mapping Environmental Memory Through Literature: A Conversation with Emily Lethbridge and Steven Hartman

2021 ◽  
pp. 269-291
Author(s):  
C. Parker Krieg ◽  
Emily Lethbridge ◽  
Steven Hartman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Research Networks ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Knowledge Communication

This chapter is an interview with two literary scholars, whose research in Icelandic and North Atlantic environmental history has led to the creation of new digital tools and interdisciplinary research networks. From the Icelandic sagas and place names, to new discoveries of medieval and early modern life writing, their distinct paths converge on the study of culture as both a repository and medium of environmental knowledge, communication, and cultural memory.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

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).

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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