Freya Sierhuis

Katrin Röder

Russ Leo

Fulke Greville's reputation has always been overshadowed by that of his more famous friend, Philip Sidney, a legacy due in part to Greville's complex moulding of his authorial persona as Achates to Sidney's Aeneas, and in part to the formidable complexity of his poetry and prose. This volume seeks to vindicate Greville's 'obscurity' as an intrinsic feature of his poetic thinking, and as a privileged site of interpretation. The seventeen essays shed new light on Greville's poetry, philosophy, and dramatic work. They investigate his examination of monarchy and sovereignty; grace, salvation, and the nature of evil; the power of poetry and the vagaries of desire, and they offer a reconsideration of his reputation and afterlife in his own century, and beyond. The volume explores the connections between poetic form and philosophy, and argues that Greville's poetic experiments and meditations on form convey penetrating, and strikingly original contributions to poetics, political thought, and philosophy. Highlighting stylistic features of his poetic style, such as his mastery of the caesura and of the feminine ending; his love of paradox, ambiguity, and double meanings; his complex metaphoricity and dense, challenging syntax, these essays reveal how Greville's work invites us to revisit and rethink many of the orthodoxies about the culture of post-Reformation England, including the shape of political argument, and the forms and boundaries of religious belief and identity.

Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance

Katrin Roder

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relationship between mind and body and between experience and the senses. Some chapters discuss literature, in studies of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; other essays concentrate on philosophical arguments, both Aristotelian and Galenic models from antiquity, and new mechanistic formations in Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. A powerful sense of paradox emerges in treatments of the passions in the early modern period, also reflected in new literary and philosophical forms in which inwardness was displayed, analysed and studied”the autobiography, the essay, the soliloquy”genres which rewrite the formation of subjectivity. At the same time, the frame of reference moves outwards, from the world of interior states to encounter the passions on a public stage, thus reconnecting literary study with the history of political thought. In between the abstract theory of political ideas and the inward selves of literary history, lies a field of intersections waiting to be explored. The passions, like human nature itself, are infinitely variable, and provoke both literary experimentation and philosophical imagination. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture thus makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the emotions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interdisciplinary history.

Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture

The Literature of the Arminian Controversy highlights the importance of the Arminian Controversy (1609-1619) for the understanding of the literary and intellectual culture of the Dutch Golden Age. Taking into account a wide array of sources, ranging from theological and juridical treatises, to pamphlets, plays and and libel poetry, it offers not only a deeper contextualisation of some of the most canonical works of the period, such as the works of Dirck Volckertz. Coornhert, Hugo Grotius and Joost van den Vondel, but also invites the reader to rethink the way we view the relation between literature and theology in early modern culture. The book argues how the controversy over divine predestination acted as a catalyst for literary and cultural change, tracing the impact of disputed ideas on grace and will, religious toleration and the rights of the civil magistrate in satirical literature, poetry and plays. Conversely, it reads the theological and political works as literature, by examining the rhetoric and tropes of religious controversy. Analysing the way in which literature shapes the political and religious imaginary, it allows us to look beyond the history of doctrine, or the history of political rights, to include the emotive and imaginative power of such narrative, myth and metaphor.

Freya Sierhuis

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