Literature

This book studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England. It tracks his negotiations among personalities and events; it explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions; and it speculates on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings — what we call Andrew Marvell’s ‘imagined life’. The book draws the figure of this imagined life from the repeated traces that Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and it suggests how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination. The book sheds new light on some of Marvell’s most familiar poems — Upon Appleton House, The Garden, To His Coy Mistress, and An Horatian Ode; but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell’s The unfortunate Lover, his least familiar and surely his most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.

Aphra Behn, now becoming recognized as a major Restoration figure, is especially significant as an early example of a successful professional woman writer: an important and often troubling role-model for later generations of women. This book shows that her influence on 18th-century literature was far-reaching. Because literary history was (and to an extent still is) based on notions of patrilineal succession, it has been difficult to recognize the generative work of women's texts among male writers. This book suggests that Behn had 'sons' as well as ‘daughters’ and argues that we need a feminist revision of the notion of literary influence. Behn's reputation was very different in different genres. The book analyses her reception as a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist, showing how reactions to her became an important part of the creation of the English literary canon.

This book interrogates standard narratives about national identity in early modern England by examining the ways Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early 17th century contested and shaped discourses of the nation, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on recent reassessments of English Catholicism this study foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. The book examines a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. The argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by under-studied figures like Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.

This book assesses the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity from the reign of Elizabeth I and the early Stuart kings through the English Revolution, and into the Restoration. Throughout this period, which included debate about readmission of the Jews, England was preoccupied with Jews and Israel. As the Reformation sharpened national identity and prompted reconsideration of the relation of Christianity to Judaism, English people showed new interest in Jewish history and Judaism and appropriated biblical Israel's history in the Hebrew Bible, even as reformed Christianity was to be purged of Jewish elements. The mix of identification and opposition, affinity and distance, in English attitudes toward Jews held positive possibilities for Jewish‐Christian relations as well as negative. Grounded in archival research, this book analyzes writings ranging from those of Foxe and Hooker to Milton's and Dryden's, from sermons to lyrics, from church polemic to proposals for legal and economic reform. Literary figures discussed include Herrick, Vaughan, Bunyan, Milton, and Dryden. Attention is also paid to publications associated with James I, Charles I, and Cromwell, and writings by and about such figures as William Prynne, Gerrard Winstanley, Margaret Fell, George Fox, Menasseh ben Israel, Abiezer Coppe, and Anna Trapnel.

The notions of virtue and vice are essential components of the Western ethical tradition. But in early modern France they were called into question, as writers (most famously La Rochefoucauld) argued that what appears as virtue is in fact disguised vice: people carry out praiseworthy deeds because they stand to gain in some way; they deserve no credit for their behaviour because they have no control over it; they are governed by feelings and motives of which they may not be aware. Disguised Vices analyses the underlying logic of these arguments, and investigates what is at stake in them. It traces the arguments back to their sources in earlier writers, showing how ancient philosophers (especially Aristotle and Seneca) formulated the distinction between behaviour that counts as virtuous and behaviour that only seems so. It explains how St Augustine reinterpreted the distinction in the light of the difference between pagans and Christians, and how medieval and early modern theologians strove to reconcile Augustine’s position with that of Aristotle. It examines the restatement of Augustine’s position by his hard-line early modern followers (especially the Jansenists), and the controversy to which this gave rise. Finally, it examines La Rochefoucauld’s critique of virtue and assesses the extent of its links with the Augustinian current of thought.

In early modern Britain, the primary medium of free comment was the clandestine satire, circulated either orally or in manuscript. Part of the national political culture from Jacobean times, satire reached its greatest influence following the Restoration of Charles II, when a new ‘easy’ style, combining courtly polish with demotic frankness and flagrant indecency, led to the composition of thousands of such poems. Most of the poets of the time, including such major talents as Marvell and Rochester, wrote in the genre, though nearly always anonymously. While its chief targets were political, much Restoration satire concerned itself with the emerging demography of ‘Town’ and its uncertain experimentation with new kinds of social freedom. Attacks on the sexual misbehaviour (real or imagined) of aristocratic women hover, equally uncertainly, between moral condemnation and ill-disguised envy, while also conferring an inverse celebrity status on their victims. In this paradoxical social world, not to be lampooned could mean that one was no longer a person of importance. In the first comprehensive survey of this vast field, Harold Love considers the relationship of the lampoon to gossip, how one might construct a poetics of the genre, and how clandestine satire reached and was received by its readers. Constructing three primary categories of ‘court’, ‘Town’ and ‘state’ lampooning, Love argues that far from being the product of isolated disaffection, most satire was the work of a circle of recognized poets, frequently operating in collaboration. An extensive first-line index to the principal manuscript sources for clandestine satire makes this book an open sesame to further exploration of its fascinating field.