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Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface.
... It is not 43 See, e.g. Dunn (1994); and more generally, Kraye (ed) (1996). 44 Ginsburg (2003), pp. ...
The third technological revolution is dragging the world, incrementally but surely, into an era where Artificial Intelligent (AI) is taking over cultural production from human beings. Nevertheless, authorship remains largely defined in humanistic terms across Western cultures as a projection of the image of the “romantic author” emanating from the 18th century. Although it is not spelt out in the law, judges do seem to demonstrate remarked reluctance to grant authorship status to AI. The developments in three important areas may enable a reconstruction of the human-centric authorship ideology: a structural pro-corporate prejudice, a low threshold for originality, and the judicial avoidance of aesthetic assessment. Distilled to its essence, AI can be as equally creative as human beings as they follow the same laws of cultural production. In dealing with the resulting ownership issue of AI authorship, an altered “work made for hire” doctrine is proposed as a promising solution design template.
... 11 Sobre a importância e a construção dos prefácios na época moderna, cf., a título de exemplo, Dunn (1994), Evans (1999), e Sánchez-Cuervo (2009). de suportar 12 . ...
O livro Diálogos Luso-Sefarditas decorre do II Colóquio Internacional “Diálogos Luso-Sefarditas”, realizado no Museu de Aveiro – Santa Joana, em 12 e 13 de dezembro de 2019. Integra um conjunto de estudos da autoria de investigadores nacionais e estrangeiros, contribuindo para a dinamização e a divulgação da investigação sobre a riqueza das relações luso-sefarditas (a nível local, nacional e internacional), parte integrante da identidade portuguesa e lusófona, através do estudo das suas múltiplas manifestações em áreas tão diversas como a farmácia, a filosofia, a história, a literatura ou a medicina, entre outros domínios do saber.
... This reading, I would argue, entirely overrides the dominant sense of remarkably assured assessments and evaluations and vastly overstates the text's disclaimers and hedging expressions in order to stress its "instability". 20 | Cf. Dunn (1994). For the complex relations between authorship and authority in the period in question, cf. also Miller (1986), esp. ...
... Prefatory declarations of modest ability and reluctant authorship, such as Macintosh's, are sufficiently commonplace in works of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century travel writing that they risk being dismissed simply as "highly conventionalized" defaults, rather than being acknowledged as deliberate and crafted elements of rhetorical strategy (Sherman, 1996, p. 180). Scholarly attention to the role and evolution of the textual preface has shown, however, that its conventions are part of a venerable rhetorical tradition whose origins lie in Classical understandings of appropriate and convincing oratory (Dunn, 1994;Sell, 2006). ...
The author examines the writing, editing, anonymous publication, and translation of a late-eighteenth-century text of travel and political sedition: Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782). Written by William Macintosh, a Scots-born Caribbean plantation owner turned political commentator, Travels was considered by contemporaries to be incendiary—precipitating British governmental action against the East India Company, inspiring revolutionary spirit in France, informing politicians in the United States during the drafting of the Constitution, and instructing natural philosophers in Germany on questions of race and civilization. The author argues that the international spatial mobility of Macintosh’s book was facilitated by geographically distinct acts of editing, translation, and reproduction. The complex publication history of Travels—across editions in English, German, and French—is used to demonstrate that Macintosh’s work was differently staged for different linguistic audiences. The author concludes by reflecting more broadly on the importance of mediation to the mobility of knowledge.
... 14 As a means for having access to, or strengthening patronage relations, they were written in the form of a letter to the patron and placed before the beginning of the work. 15 Although printed books provided the possibility of reaching a wider 13 See Lerner & Segonds (2003), p. 394 n. 1. 14 On dedicatory letters, see the studies by Dunn (1994); Farenga (1994); Richardson (1999), pp. 50-57;Tarquini, (2001), Ch. ...
Copernicuss De revolutionibus (1543) and Girolamo Fracastoro's Homocentrica (1538) were both addressed to Pope Paul III (1534-1549). Their dedicatory letters represent a rhetorical exercise in advocating an astronomical reform and an attempt to obtain the papal favour. Following on from studies carried out by Westman (1990) and Barker & Goldstein (2003), this paper deals with cultural, intellectual and scientific motives of both texts, and aims at underlining possible relations between them, such as that Copernicus knew of Fracastoro's Homocentrica, and that at least part of the rhetorical strategy laid out in De revolutionibus's dedicatory letter can be read as a sophisticated response to Fracastoro's arguments.
The translator’s positionality is not merely imposed by the public or literary stakeholders, but he or she has often been an active co-constructor of it. My claim goes beyond repeating the norm of self-effacement: translators to this day have staked the humble position in ways strikingly like those used by authors, making the humility topos, I argue, a writerly gesture. This work surveys the rhetoric of humility, its nuances and justifications, and diverse publics for whom these strategies are performed: authors, patrons, or readers. Ethos, persona, and hexis form part of the self-fashioning strategies that are also trust-building, and which often reveal slippages into self-assertions and even preemptive challenges. The practice extends well beyond early modern literature to the modern era, as I illustrate. I entertain whether humility is in fact the translator ‘under erasure’, not invisible but visible-in-invisibility. As modesty topoi are also shown to often be mere translation norms, “devotional formula”, or even immodesty in disguise, this work considers many of its ‘rhetorical moves’, complicating assumptions of the meek translator. Finally, I briefly delineate an ‘immodesty turn’ with perhaps ancient origins but found full-voiced in certain feminist translators. Forms of immodesty overtly assert authorhood and explicitly ‘write back’ against the rhetoric of the past.
Keywords: ethos; modesty; humility; rhetoric; the translator’s subject position; self-presentation; trust.
Although the idea of ‘Elements of mathematics’ is usually closely linked to that of geometry, some early-modern authors also proposed alternatives. Jean Prestet, a protégé of the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, developed an analytic basis for mathematics, which he presented as largely Cartesian. Prestet’s emphasis on arithmetic and algebra pushed him to subject to proof what had been hitherto seen as obvious facts, to treat symbolic expressions as integers, and to renew and extend Diophantine analysis as well as combinatorial questions. These features, in return, challenged both Prestet’s publisher and Descartes’ viewpoint. These interconnected aspects of Prestet’s treatise, several editions of which are kept in the Russell Library, are discussed here.
This chapter analyses the paratextual and epistolary rhetorical strategies connected with private practices of knowledge production used by the sixteenth-century Paduan natural philosopher, apothecary, and writer Camilla Herculiana (Erculiani). To legitimize her authorship, she used different rhetorical strategies, but her self-portrayal as a woman, housewife, mother, and wife, and her references to household maintenance, solving daily problems, and being free to learn only in the hours of the night, furnish fruitful terrain for a rhetorical-cultural analysis. Such an analysis will shed important light on the relationships between the private and public spheres, gender hierarchies, and the meaning of privacy in late sixteenth-century knowledge-making.
Les années 1540-1550 représentent un moment clé pour les traditions poétiques espagnoles et françaises car l’on voit paraître Las Obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso (…) (1543) et L’Olive et quelques autres œuvres poétiques (1549). Ces recueils partagent un même projet de défense et illustration de la langue à partir de l’acclimatation des poèmes italiens et antiques. Ils représentent un modèle pour les recueils ultérieurs et, dans ce travail, nous analysons la « poétique du recueil » dans les ouvrages rassemblant, en Espagne et en France au XVe siècle, un canzoniere (sonnets et chansons) et une section de poèmes antiques. Nous comparons ces recueils en attirant l’attention sur ce que représente, pour un poète, le fait de confier ses poèmes à l’imprimerie et de les disposer soigneusement à l’intérieur du recueil. Imposer au canzoniere et aux différentes sections du recueil une disposition architecturale implique une conscience nouvelle. Celle-ci laisse sa marque dans la présentation matérielle du livre, dans les paratextes et dans la nouvelle image d’auteur que le poète se forge dès l’ouverture du recueil.
Die frühe Neuzeit ist eine Zeit des (Self-) Fashioning. Huldigungstexte, die einerseits fiktionalen Charakter haben, sich auf der anderen Seite mit realen sozialen Abhängigkeitsverhältnissen und Restriktionen berühren, bilden verschiedene Arten von Grenzen ab: Sie zeigen Grenzen zwischen Fiktionalität und sozialen Gegebenheiten, sie markieren die Schwelle vom Autor zum Buch. Im Fall frühneuzeitlicher Texte, die weibliche Autorschaft bewerben, werden die Grenzen und Schlupflöcher der diskursiven Felder ausgelotet, an denen Frauen ihren Eintritt in den Diskurs argumentativ begründen bzw. dem Stigma ihres Frauseins entgegnen können. Da soziales Handeln auch das Produkt eines Profit- und Interessenstrebens ist, gilt es auch für frühneuzeitliche Autorinnen, bestimmte Arten von Kapital für sich in Anspruch zu nehmen. Da ihnen jedoch im Regelfall der Zugang zu bestimmten Kapitalarten wie zu ökonomischem Kapital und inkorporiertem Kulturkapital patriarchalgesellschaftlich verweigert wird, gilt es, sich zur Legitimation der Autorschaft bzw. zur Positionierung im sozialen Feld der Kulturproduktion, den Eintritt in die ihnen verwehrte Sphäre auf besonders originelle Weise zu verteidigen oder sich Zugang zu anderen Kapitalarten zu verschaffen. Eine Möglichkeit, das Schreiben trotz aller Barrieren zu verteidigen, besteht darin, dieselben Restriktionen positiv zu affirmieren, die die Person eigentlich an jeglicher öffentlicher Äußerung hindern sollten. Diese Option nutzen die Autorinnen der mütterlichen Ratgeberbücher, der Mother‘s Advice Books. Eine Kapitalart, deren Aneignung sich als äußerst produktiv und kaum antastbar erweist, ergänzt Bourdieus Kapitalarten für die frühe Neuzeit: das religiöse Kapital. Mit Frömmigkeit und Gottesnähe und dem Auftrag, in Gottes Namen zu sprechen, lässt sich Autorschaft besonders im Feld der religiösen Traktate verteidigen. Es gibt auch die Möglichkeit, das Stigma von Weiblichkeit und Autorschaft, an der eigenen Wurzel anzupacken und nach dem Grund und der Berechtigung der Restriktionen und der damit einhergehenden Stigmatisierung zu fragen. Diese Strategie wird in der Regel von den Autorinnen protofeministischer Polemiken verfolgt. Die ›Verbrecherinnen‹ erschüttern mit ihren Lebensweisen die Grenzen des Diskurses nicht nur an einer Stelle, sondern an mehreren gleichzeitig und stellen damit gesellschaftliche Normen und die soziale Stratifikation an sich infrage. Im Bereich der Dichtung wird rhetorisch geschicktes Lavieren und die Zurschaustellung von wit grundsätzlich gefordert. An diesen Stellen vexieren das Bild der Autorin und des zu bewerbenden Werks am meisten. Literarische Entwürfe eines Ichs (oder Dus) machen die Huldigungstexte noch mehr zu einer Kunst, die die Möglichkeit bietet, der Sphäre der sozialen Realität mit all ihren Normen und Restriktionen für kurze Momente enthoben sein zu können. Die Texte stellen einen doppelten Anspruch an die schreibenden Frauen, Eigenwerbung zu betreiben und ihre Unterwürfigkeit zu demonstrieren. Gemeinsam ist den Paratexten in dieser heterogenen Zusammenstellung die paradoxe (Selbst-) Inszenierung der Schriftstellerinnen zwischen einem Macht- und Selbstbehauptungsanspruch einerseits und der auch rhetorisch umspielten Machtlosigkeit im Feld der früh-neuzeitlichen Literaturproduktion andererseits. Egal in welchem diskursiven Feld sich die Autorinnen bewegen: Um sich zu äußern, ist es notwendig, findig und einfallsreich zu sein und soziale Barrieren durch geschickte Argumentation zu transgredieren, auszuhebeln oder darunter hindurch zu schlüpfen. Huldigungstexte bilden den idealen Schauplatz für die Verteidigung weiblicher Autorschaft. In ihnen leisten die Autorinnen den rhetorischen Spagat, gleichzeitig ihre Autorschaft und ihr Frausein zu behaupten.
The early modern period is a period of (Self-) fashioning. Texts of adoration are works of fiction - at the same time, their purpose is to represent ›real‹ social restrictions and relations of dependence. Thereby early modern texts of adoration highlight different borders: They show the border between fiction and social realities; they mark the threshold between an author and her book. Early modern texts aiming to promote female authorship test the limits and loopholes of the discursive fields, at which women have to justify their engaging in the discourse and counter their stigma of being a woman writer. As social action is always also the result of profit seeking and pursuing one’s own interests, early modern women writers also needed to avail themselves of certain forms of capital. By patriarchal power structures they were usually being denied the access to certain forms of capital such as economic capital and embodied cultural capital. Therefore they had to legitimize their authorship in a particularly original way and/or obtain access to other forms of capital. Early modern women writers made use of the following strategies: With the help of powerful and influential advocates, who are equipped with symbolic and social capital, the stigma of being a woman writer may be invalidated. One possibility to defend one’s writing in spite of all social barriers is to affirm – in writing – the same restrictions which should prevent the women from writing publicly. The authors of the Mother‘s Advice Books make use of this option. A form of capital whose appropriation proves to be highly productive, supplements Bourdieu’s forms of capital in the theoretical framework: the religious capital. Piety, the proximity to God, and being able to speak in the Lord’s name help to defend authorship particularly in the field of religious discourse. Another possibility is to tackle the root of the problem and to ask for the reasons and the legitimisation of the stigma attached to women authors. This strategy is effectively pursued by the authors of proto-feminist polemics. The ›rogues‹ and their ways of life stir up the limits of the discourse at several points simultaneously. Thereby they help to question social norms and stratifications. The field of poetry is used as a playground for rhetorical manoeuvring and the display of wit. Here the texts offer different and diverse images of the authors and their respective book. Here the texts of adoration offer possibilities to be temporarily exempt from the norms and restrictions the women authors are usually subject to. Early modern texts of adoration demand two things from their authoresses: to advertise themselves and at the same time to show themselves submissively. All of the paratexts in this diverse compilation have this aspect in common: the paradoxical (Self-) fashioning of the women authors between gestures of self-assertion on the one hand and the demonstration of their powerlessness in the field of early modern literature production on the other hand. Independent of the discursive field in which the early modern authoresses want to express themselves: in order to speak at all, they have to be resourceful and imaginative and they have to transgress, invalidate or slip through social barriers by clever lines of argument. Texts of adoration are ideal for defending female authorship. Within these texts, the authors balance between claiming their authorship and their womanhood at the same time.
This chapter uses new approaches to seventeenth-century paratexts to analyse medical texts addressed to the poor, with the aim of illuminating face-to-face interactions between practitioners, their peers and competitors (from housewife to apothecary to learned physician), and patients. In a seventeenth-century context, printed texts could be seen as proxies for the author’s spoken address to a specific audience or audiences. This brought them within the constraints of spoken decorum, itself governed by which topics were considered proper for which rank. The chapter looks at the paratexts to Thomas Law’s Physick for the Poor (1657) and shows how they constitute a set of relationships between medical professionals, amateurs and patients which were fluid and ephemeral, shifting between coalition and competition in response to social setting.
The history of English literary criticism has traditionally been presented as the history of the poet-critic. In Watson’s suggestively titled overview The Literary Critics, for example, the major pre-twentieth-century critical phases surveyed bear the name of the representative poet-critic. Even a casual glance at other critical histories and anthologies reveals a similar emphasis.1 Such an approach is problematic because it suggests that the poet-critic is always representative, or at the cutting-edge, of a particular period or movement. While other writers are mentioned, they are, at best, only secondary to the model of the poet-critic: Rymer and Dennis obviously cannot fare well in a chapter titled “Dryden and Some Later Seventeenth-Century Themes,” or simply “John Dryden.” Recent scholarship on the emerging institutions of “authorship” and “criticism” in the seventeenth century has also problematized the privileged status of the poet-critic. If the role of the author—particularly of plays—was only just beginning to assume some kind of social, cultural, and interpretive significance, and criticism was not yet established as a recognizable discipline, how could one attain the position of “poet-critic”?
In 1641, Thomas Beedome’s first and only book, Poems Divine, and Humane , was published posthumously. Considering this volume of poetry in the context of a proliferation of poetry publishing in mid-seventeenth century England and accepting the idea that early modern paratexts provided an ideal site for the renegotiation and manifestation of authorship, I argue that throughout the front matter of Beedome’s book, the largest part of which is taken up by commendatory poetry, a concept of the author, not only as singular creator, but also as proprietor of his work, is created. This essay shows how the writers of the commendatory verses try to single out Beedome by almost obsessively labelling him as a worthy author, comparing him favourably with classical and contemporary poets, and affirming the proprietary relationship between Beedome and his poems.
In the fourth book of the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90s BC) — formerly attributed to Cicero and the most popular Latin rhetorical treatise of the early modern period — the author attempts to justify the unusual procedure of including excerpts of his own poetry as exempla of the rhetorical stratagems he describes. Unlike George Puttenham, who was to use this technique unabashedly in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he must defend this decision because the authors of the Greek rhetorical handbooks that precede him typically employed conventional literary examples rather than proffering their own creative efforts: ‘And their first ground is that in doing so they are prompted by modesty, because it seems a kind of ostentation not to be content to teach the art, but to appear desirous themselves of creating examples artificially.’1 To this argument the author of the Ad Herennium provides a complex and vigorous rejoinder:
First, then, let us beware lest the Greeks offer us too childish an argument in their talk about modesty. For if modesty consists in saying nothing or writing nothing, why do they write or speak at all?… It is as if some one should come to the Olympic games to run, and having taken a position for the start, should accuse of impudence those who have begun the race — should himself stand within the barrier and recount to others how Ladas used to run, or Boiscus in the Isthmian games. These Greek rhetoricians do likewise. When they have descended into the race-course of our art, they accuse of immodesty those who put in practice the essence of the art; they praise some ancient orator, poet, or literary work, but without themselves daring to come forth into the stadium of rhetoric. I should not venture to say so, yet I fear that in their very pursuit of praise for modesty they are impudent.
(IV.ii.3)
"The Status of Reading in Early Modern English Literature" explores the social implications of print publication in England from the 1590s to the 1630s. Analyzing the fictional worlds of texts and their material forms, "The Status of Reading" pushes against a scholarly trend that emphasizes writers??? anxieties and fears about print publication. It claims instead that writers often invoked a popular reading public in opposition to the elite, rarefied world of aristocratic court circles. This reading public was tied to the needs and ideas of the writers who called it into being, and who used it strategically to explore their own cultural importance and the growing importance of people outside the ranks of the aristocracy as taste-makers. In invoking this reading public, writers developed new notions of status and claimed an alternate hierarchy of intellectual merit that existed in tension with the social hierarchy. Their works explore various ways people could achieve this new status: attaining an aristocratic title through proving one???s intelligence and wit; gaining cultural capital based on popularity; or asserting the unique value of cultural contributions made by people whose gender or social position were considered subordinate. The texts under consideration???Christopher Marlowe???s "Doctor Faustus;" William Shakespeare???s "Twelfth Night," "Macbeth," "Love???s Labour???s Lost," "As You Like It," and "Sonnets;" Aemilia Lanyer???s "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum;" and Ben Jonson???s "The New Inn" and "Ode to Himself"???foreground multiple forms of publication to different readers. Each text stages fictional reading practices and the circulation of texts; moreover, its print manifestation addresses imagined readers to whom the text is marketed. Together, these texts challenge traditional hierarchical structures on two fronts: while exploring what it meant for readers to advance socially through reading well, they also suggest that a popular reading public, made of commoners, should be considered just as culturally valuable???or perhaps more culturally valuable???than smaller, socially elite communities of readers. In attending to the ways writers constructed and empowered a common reading public, "The Status of Reading" significantly expands our understanding of the social dynamics of reading in an age of increasing literacy and access to texts.
«Dear friend, I am writing this letter to you in my own hand...». Such are the declarations of medieval authors whose texts are here collected and analyzed. In a world where the vast majority of intellectuals did not write with their own hand, but rather employed a secretary who wrote under dictation, the epistolary milieu was one of the contexts in which the practice of autography and its valorization developed, foreshadowing their spread in the modern age. The letters often offer information concerning the circumstances in which they were written and the aims of their authors, and therefore constitute a suitable source; the analysis of the references to autography in Latin letter written between the beginning of the XI century and the first half of the XIII allows to examine the authors’ awareness of the possible uses and advantages of autography, and more generally their conception of writing and composing.
A review on the types of titles and its changes emphasizes the relevance of this element in the paratexts of the books of poetry and their effective participation in the tasks entrusted to the statement of preliminary in the period of manual printing. The analysis of linguistic typologies by Hoek and its consideration by Genette as generic value in the threshold for the printed work, we add the perspective of its historical dimension, with the alteration in diachrony between 1650 and 1750. The displacements of the conceptual models in the labeling of texts in the low Baroque (obras, Parnasian topics, ocio) and its systematic character confirm the validity given to this element by the authors when they are reconfiguring its relation with works and their movement in a literary republic under renovation.
This text explores three developments pertaining to children and reading in seventeenth-century England. The author aims to show how profoundly death was implicated in the development of thought about children's reading as well as in the emergence of a literature for children in the early modem period. The first chapter discusses the negative reaction to the growing phenomenon of children reading romances and adventures in chapbook form. Escapist literature was believed to make one forget one's mortal lot, which in turn decreased one's motivation for piety. Through a discussion of the threat chapbook romances posed to pious reading, the chapter establishes the historical context for a related development, the creation of a religious or moralizing literature that children would find compelling. In their quest for gripping settings, authors latched on to the deathbed scene for its felicitous blend of inherent theatricality and religious resonance. By early seventeenth century, a few women writers even used the pretext of deathbed advice to pen their own conduct-of-life manuals in an otherwise male-dominated marketplace. The second chapter discusses the prefatory rhetoric used by the two most successful female writers in this genre. The remarkable success of maternal deathbed advice literature suggests that books in Protestant culture absorbed the near-superstitious value of Catholic icons and relics. The genre also implies a Protestant adaptation of the Catholic veneration of the mother. Comfort for the motherless child no longer came from prayer to Mary, but through the reading (and perhaps holding of) a book of advice by a model (and dead) Protestant mother. An analysis of the prefaces enables a close reading of the self-fashioning
Rhetorical Evaluation of Seventeenth Century Prefaces to English Treatises on Midwifery
This study tries to offer a rhetorical account of the main arguments and figures encountered in 17 th c. English prefaces, dealing with the art of midwifery and the delivery of children. I foreground a main causal argument wherein the author states the necessity for a treatise of this delicate nature and proposes the motives for its requirement. In doing so, some other reasonings support the causation and provide the reader with more evidence for a good performance at childbirth. In addition, the arguments are enhanced by the presence of some figures of communion that contribute to the rhetorical organisation, and help to portray the prologue as an expository discourse. The insistence on complying with the author's directions, and the urge not to follow some predecessors' work also suggests the new authority that the early modern English preface writer is acquiring.
Das zweisprachige Emblembuch >Emblematum Tyrocinia: Sive Picta Poesis Latinogermanica. Das ist Eingeblümete Zierwerck oder Gemälpoesy< wurde im Jahre 1581 von Bernhard Jobin in Straßburg publiziert. Die typen- und motivgeschichtlich orientierte Analyse der strukturellen Ordnungsprinzipien des Emblembuches, vor allem der lateinischen und deutschen Texte von Mathias Holtzwart und der Holzschnitte nach Tobias Stimmer, zeigt den Gegensatz, in dem das Emblembuch zur literarischen Anthologie steht: Die besondere Form des Emblembuches erweist sich als das späthumanistisch geprägte Programm eines idealen "curriculum vitae". Die künstlerischen Techniken des Zitats symbolischer Bildmotive und literarischer Topoi in Bild und Text der >Emblematum Tyrocinia< bedingen hierbei die komplexen Bedeutungen der einzelnen Embleme und ihres Kontextes. Die in der Forschung zur Emblematik bislang vernachlässigten historischen Praktiken der Leser konnten im Fall der >Emblematum Tyrocinia< an zwei als "album amicorum" benutzten Exemplaren beschrieben werden. Diese Praktik läßt ebenso wie die deutschsprachige Vorrede Johann Fischarts, die zweite Auflage der Holzschnitte mit Texten Nikolaus Reusners (Straßburg 1587) und die künstlerischen Rezeptionen durch Matthias Merian dem Aelteren (Straßburg 1624) nicht nur Einsichten in die "Dispositionen" der Leser zu, sondern auch in die Intentionen des Verlegers. Die Emblembücher des späten 16. Jahrhunderts wurden im deutschsprachigen Raum zunehmend als "album amicorum" präsentiert - eine Entwicklung, an deren Anfang die Verlagsinitiative Bernhard Jobins steht und deren Verlauf von den Praktiken der Leser bestimmt wurde.
This article examines a seventeenth-century textual debate between Suzanne Du Verger and Margaret Cavendish about monasticism and women's authorship. In her polemic, Du Vergers Humble Reflections (1657), Du Verger corrects an anti-monastic passage from Cavendish's The World's Olio (1655) and, in so doing, constructs women's authorship as having political agency in the public sphere. In revising the inaccuracies of Cavendish's representation of monasticism, she rejects the inconsistencies of Cavendish's authorial position as aristocratic privilege and posits her own work as representing an authentic voice from outside Cavendish's elite social class. Du Verger adapts the paratextual genre of the dedicatory epistle as a textual public sphere for defending Catholicsim and advocating for disconnecting literary authority from class structures.
This thesis examines the ways that Augustinian and Petrarchan poetics and philosophy both influenced and frustrated the author of Paradise Lost, for John Milton’s works in many ways represent a culmination of the linguistic and moral angst of Augustine and Petrarch, especially in their obsession with the power of rhetoric, a desire for linguistic permanency and power, and the divided consciousness of Western male subjectivity. Indeed, the enduring rhetorical command of Milton’s Satan in particular, 350 years after his literary creation, attests to the cultural and psychological potency of the model of suffering masculinity. The first chapter locates both Augustinian and Petrarchan influence and religious anxiety in Milton’s shorter, earlier poems including his Italian sonnets; the second chapter explores the ways that Milton’s elegy, Lycidas, both imitates and rejects Petrarchan and classical tropes; the third chapter explores these ideas in Paradise Lost, especially the ways that the character of Satan embodies Milton’s views on rhetoric and poetry. The end result will be a fuller appreciation of the anxiety that a modern, Christian poet, heir of Augustinian and Petrarchan poetics, displays through his art, especially the conflict between the desire for linguistic glory and permanency and a conviction that such ambition is inherently sinful according to Christian morality.
Little in the way of politics has ever been detected in Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus (1658). The following essay, however, reconsiders Cyrus in relation to the politically sensitive May Day celebrations of the mid-seventeenth century, and to the host of orchard and planting manuals which were appearing at the same time, a genre able to contain the ideological, economic and spiritual aspirations of Anglicans and Puritans, Royalists and radicals alike. Like most of Browne’s other major works, Cyrus avoids direct political or pragmatic interventions and instead enacts, structurally and rhetorically, the competing ideas of order which animated the public antagonisms of the late 1650s.
The article discusses the model of a "public sphere" of rational critical debate formulated by Jiirgen Habermas. It suggests that recent attempts to relocate the genesis of this public sphere in seventeenth-century Britain overlook the specific characteristics that Habermas attributes to it: reason, inclusiveness, and non-instrumentality. The reality of seventeenth-century debate, and the practicalities of the book trade ill fit this ideal type. The creation of an informed and critical public depended at least as much on commerce and polemical conflict as on open and reasoned exchange, and a fuller account of public opinion needs both more specific research and a model sensitive to these dichotomies.
The preface by Ælfric occurs in complete form in two manuscripts and in part in a third. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Miscellany 509 (s. xi ² ) contains the preface (fols. 1–3, headed with the words Incipit prefatio genesis anglice ), together with the Old English Hexateuch (fols. 3–107) and Ælfric's selections from Judges (fols. 108–15). Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33 (s. xii ² ) has the preface, without tide, followed by Ælfric's partial translation of Genesis (fols. 2–24). London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv (St Augustine's, Canterbury, s. xi ¹ ), having lost its first leaf, now preserves only the second half of the preface followed by an illustrated text of the Old English Hexateuch , but a sixteenth-century transcript by Robert Talbot, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 379, preserves some of its missing text, along with the same tide as Laud 509. Both Laud 509 and Claudius B. iv give slightly different compilations of the translations by Ælfric with the more extensive work of the anonymous scriptural translator (or translators). The differing rubrics and contents of the manuscripts affect the way we read the preface that they share: the Cambridge manuscript presents it as a preface to half of Genesis only, Laud 509 and the transcript label it a preface at least to the whole of Genesis. If, however, the incipit is scribal, it could be taken as a prologue to the Hexateuch . Was the preface, then, intended by Ælfric to introduce just the first half of Genesis, or a larger work? Sisam is of the first view: ‘no preface to the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch) survives, and evidendy the compiler of the extant Old English version did not know of one, since he used Ælfric's inappropriate English preface to the first part of Genesis .’
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