Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England PDF Download

Author: Giuseppina Iacono Lobo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750120X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Revolutions of Conscience -- 1 Charles I, Eikon Basilike, and the Pulpit-Work of the King's Conscience -- 2 Oliver Cromwell and the Duties of Conscience -- 3 Early Quaker Writing and the Unifying Light of Conscience -- 4 Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Civilizing Force of Conscience -- 5 Lucy Hutchinson's Revisions of Conscience -- 6 Milton's Nation of Conscience -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Author: Giuseppina Iacono Lobo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I examine uses of conscience meant to reform and re-envision the nation in English polemics, political philosophy, personal correspondence and literature during the English Revolution. Writings from this turbulent period are rife with the language of conscience. While recent scholars have recognized the significance of this prevalent language in early modern England, important gaps remain. After all, little attention has been paid to exactly how and why writers used the language of conscience so profusely in the midst of war and revolution. This thesis will demonstrate how the civil wars opened up a space in writing for politico-spiritual experimentation in which the language of conscience took on an unprecedented formative role, with conscience itself becoming an instrument for formulating and deploying radically new visions of the English nation. More specifically, I argue that during this period the use of conscience undergoes a dramatic change: it transitions from governing individual faith and behavior to political applications in revolutionary times. This study brings a new dimension to our understanding of the ideological fluidity between the self and the state during the middle of the seventeenth-century. In this way, focusing on conscience reintegrates the religious, political and social aspects of the English Revolution in a way never before considered, while also providing a new lens for evaluating issues of nationhood and national identity. This project examines the distinctive language of conscience used by five writers or groups of writers: Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, the Quakers, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. In chapter one, on Eikon Basilike (1649), I discuss how the text’s authors used the King’s conscience as a means to maintain his subjects’ conscientious obedience even after the regicide. In chapter two, on Cromwell’s writings and speeches, I consider how Cromwell struggled to implement his program of liberty of conscience in England through his constitutional experiments of the 1650s. In chapter three, on early Quaker writing, I demonstrate how the Quakers attempted to affect national change by appealing directly to Cromwell’s conscience. In chapter four, on Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, I argue that Hutchinson revised her husband’s conscience so that he might become a republican hero, keeping alive the hope for a republican England. In chapter five, I investigate how John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) employs the idea of conscience during the Restoration to cast the restored nation as ungodly, and thus provoke dissent from his fellow nonconformists. Finally, in a brief epilogue, I discuss how Thomas Hobbes divests the individual conscience of its authority in favor of a “national conscience” in Leviathan (1651). This dissertation builds upon studies of early modern conscience, religion and nonconformity, writing of the English Revolution, and conceptions of the nation in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries.

Author: Giuseppina Iacona Lobo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487512708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Examining works by well-known figures of the English Revolution, including John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Fell Fox, Lucy Hutchinson, Thomas Hobbes, and King Charles I, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo presents the first comprehensive study of conscience during this crucial and turbulent period. Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England argues that the discourse of conscience emerged as a means of critiquing, discerning, and ultimately reimagining the nation during the English Revolution. Focusing on the etymology of the term conscience, to know with, this book demonstrates how the idea of a shared knowledge uniquely equips conscience with the potential to forge dynamic connections between the self and nation, a potential only amplified by the surge in conscience writing in the mid-seventeenth-century. Iacono Lobo recovers a larger cultural discourse at the heart of which is a revolution of conscience itself through her readings of poetry, prose, political pamphlets and philosophy, letters, and biography. This revolution of conscience is marked by a distinct and radical connection between conscience and the nation as writers struggle to redefine, reimagine, and even render anew what it means to know with as an English people.

Author: Joshua R. Held
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817361111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
"'Bold Conscience' chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint--what the author labels "cowardly conscience"--to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. Caught at the vortex of public and private concerns, the concept of the conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders on down to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the consequent regicide of King Charles I. Yet within this mix of perspectives, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting perspectives on bold conscience emerge from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices--Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors, in re-casting the idea of conscience as a private, interior, shameful state to one of boldness fit for the public realm, parallel a historical development in which the conscience becomes a platform both for royal power and for common dissent in post-Reformation England. With the 1649 regicide of King Charles I as a fulcrum that unites both literary and historical timelines, Held tracks the increasing power of the conscience from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry VIII to John Donne's court sermons, and finally to Milton's Areopagitica and Charles's defense of his kingship, Eikon Basilike. In a direct attack on Eikon Basilike, Milton destroys the prerogative of the royal conscience in Eikonoklastes, and later in Paradise Lost proposes an alternative basis for inner confidence, rooting it not in divine right but in the 'paradise within,' a metonym for conscience. Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study looks backward as well to the theological foundations of the concept in Luther of the 1520s and forward to its transformation by Locke into the term 'consciousness' in 1689. Ultimately, Held's study shows how the idea of a conscience in early modern England, long central to the private self and linked to the will, memory, and mind-emerges as a nexus between the private self and the realm of public action, a bulwark against absolute sovereignty, and its attenuation as a means of more limited, personal certainty. Whether in Milton's struggle against King Charles or Hamlet's against King Claudius, the conscience born of the Reformation becomes less a state of inner critique and more a form of outward expression fit for the communal life and commitments demanded by the early modern era"--

Author: Marco Sgarbi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3319141694
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 3618

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Book Description
Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

Author: Ryan Hackenbracht
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones. Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.

Author: Walter S H Lim
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031400062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

Author: Emma Depledge
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198821891
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.

Author: Ray Raphael
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307455998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
In twenty-two original essays, leading historians reveal the radical impulses at the founding of the American Republic. Here is a fresh, new reading of the American Revolution that gives voice and recognition to a generation of radical thinkers and doers whose revolutionary ideals outstripped those of the “Founding Fathers.” While the Founding Fathers advocated a break from Britain and espoused ideals of republican government, none proposed significant changes to the fabric of colonial society. Yet during this “revolutionary” period some people did believe that “liberty” meant “liberty for all” and that “equality” should be applied to political, economic, and religious spheres. Here are the stories of individuals and groups who exemplified the radical ideals of the American Revolution more in keeping with our own values today. This volume helps us to understand the social conflicts unleashed by the struggle for independence, the Revolution’s achievements, and the unfinished agenda it left to future generations to confront.

Author: Laura Lunger Knoppers
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191669423
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume is innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as to bold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan. Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.