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17th-century British History and Ideas 1603 James I (King James VI of Scotland) inherits the throne of England. Population of London over 200,000 1604 James I of England restores Recussancy Acts, with more persecution and the expulsion of priests. Pope Clement VIII requests that English Catholics refrain from rebellion. 1605 Unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot to blow up Houses of Parliament 1607 Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America is founded. 1616 William Shakespeare dies. 1629 Edict of Restitution allows the Roman Catholic church to recover property seized by Protestants. 1632 Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher, who founded the school of empiricism is born. 1640 Charles I of England calls the Parliament again after years of not having it. So begins the "Long Parliament" 1642 English Civil war begins.

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Page 1: 17th-century British History and Ideas › fileadmin › uni › ... · 17th-century British History and Ideas 1603 James I (King James VI of Scotland) inherits the throne of England

17th-century British History and Ideas

1603 James I (King James VI of Scotland) inherits the throne of England. Population of London over 200,000

1604 James I of England restores Recussancy Acts, with more persecution and the expulsion of priests. Pope Clement VIII requests that English Catholics refrain from rebellion.

1605 Unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot to blow up Houses of Parliament1607 Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America is

founded. 1616 William Shakespeare dies. 1629 Edict of Restitution allows the Roman Catholic church to recover

property seized by Protestants. 1632 Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher, who founded the

school of empiricism is born. 1640 Charles I of England calls the Parliament again after years of not

having it. So begins the "Long Parliament" 1642 English Civil war begins.

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Commonwealth/ Republic

1645 Oliver Cromwell reorganises Parliament’s armies and (eventually) captures Charles I.

1649 Charles I (1625-49) beheaded outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall in London

1653 Cromwell dissolves Parliament and takes the title of "Lord Protector" to rule as a dictator

1654 English chemist Robert Boyle helps founding the Philosophical College (which later becomes the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge).

1658 Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector) dies

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Restoration1660 Charles II (1649 - 85) restored to the throne (the Restoration) after

exile in Europe; the king agrees to respect the Magna Carta and the Petition of Rights

1665 The Great Plague in London; deaths probably reach 100,000 (official figure for one week alone was 8,297)

1666 The Great Fire in London burns for three days; 89 churches, 13,200 houses destroyed over an area of 400 streets

1673 The Test Act is passed, allowing only members of the Anglican Church to hold public office. Leeuwenhoeck publishes his first article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

1675 Sir Christopher Wren (1632 - 1723) begins work on the new St. Paul's Cathedral

1679 England passes the Habeas Corpus act guaranteeing people protection from arbitrary arrest.

1685 James II inherits the throne of England, and passes laws to grant rights to Catholics and dissolves many anti-Irish laws.

1687 Sir Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

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1688 England's "Glorious Revolution": James II flees to Ireland. William and Mary become joint rulers of England; Lady Anne Bowesley is embraced by Valerius of clan Ventrue

1689 The Bill of Rights is passed in England. James II leads and fails a rebellion in Ireland. King William's War between the British and the French in North America begins.

1694 The Bank of London founded1695 Lapse of the Licensing Act, pre-publication censorship is

discontinued 1697 King William's War ends. 1698 Whitehall Palace, in London, destroyed by fire

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1701 Parliament passes the Act of Settlement stating that only an Anglican can inherit the throne.

1702-13 Queen Anne's War between the British and the French in North America begins. England's first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant is founded.

1707 The Act of Union joins Scotland and England into the UnitedKingdom of Great Britian.

1714 George, the German Elector of Hanover becomes King George I, of Britain

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The 17th Century

“History is not a narrative of events. The historian's difficult task is to explain what happened. The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. The dates are arbitrary, since they relate to the deaths of queens, not to the life of the community. Nevertheless, during the seventeenth century modern English society and a modern state began to take shape, and England's position in the world was transformed.”

(from: Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution. 1603-1714. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1991, p. 1. See also Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.)

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The mutability and decay theme(e.g. Spenser, Goodman) =>

The constancy in mutability theme

Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature Proved by Natural Reason (1616)

George Hakewill, Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, Consisting in an Examination and Censure of theCommon Errour Touching Nature‘s Perpetual and Universal Decay (1627)

De Constantia of Justus Lipsius (publislied in 1583, translated into English in 1595 by John Stradling.

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Concepts of Time in the 17th Century

Guibbory, Achsah. The Map of Time. Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History. Urbana und Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

1) The Idea of Decay(Donne and Dryden; for theoretical statements see FulkeGreville and Henry Reynolds and Goodman)

perpetual decay since the fallclassical concept of the four ages (gold, silver, brass, iron)

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2) The Cyclical View of History:

classical literature, cyclical view => historiography teaches useful lessons

examples for this historiography:

Machiavelli: "All Countries in their alterations, doo most commonly chaunge from order to disorder, and from disorder to order againe. For nature having made all worldly thinges variable, so soone as they haue atteined their vttermost perfection and height, doo of force descend: and being come downe so low, as lower they cannot, of necessitie must ascend. So that from good they descended to euill, and from euill ascend to good” (9)

Fulke Greville: "States have degrees, as humane bodies have/ Springs, Summer, Autumne, Winter and the graue." (A Treatise of Warres, st. 42, p. 10)

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3) The Idea of Progress (increasingly influential during the 17th cent)

Bibl.: Nisbet, Robert A. History of the Idea of Progress. With a new Introduction by the author. New Brunswick and London: Transactions Publishers, 1994, 1998 (originally published 1980).

Science:

• Tycho Brahe (1572) and Kepler (1604) => God continues the act of creation; science can teach its directions (19). Giordano Bruno: unchanging universe = dead universe change is not decay.

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626): science can regain prelapsarianknowledge . See Francis Bacon. The Advancement of Learning. 1605. Reprint. London: Everyman, 1984.

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Christian tradition:

Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593-1597):

“God has never interpreted change as decay, but rather as improvement and perfection: typology: the events in the New Testament represent eschatological perfections of their typologies in the Old Testament”(24) (e.g. Eve and Maria, Adam and Jesus, etc.).

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BibliographyBush, Douglas. The Early Seventeenth Century. 1600-1660. Jonson, Donne, and Milton.

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945; second revised edition 1962; rpt. 1990. ( = TheOxford History of English Literature)

Carlton, Charles. Charles I. The Personal Monarch. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1995.Doran, Susan und Christopher Durston. Princes, Pastors and People. The Church and

Religion in England 1529-1689. London: Routledge, 1991.Keeble, N. H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Schröder, Hans-Christoph. Die Revolutionen Englands im 17. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt/Main:

Edition Suhrkamp, 1986 (= Neue Historische Bibliothek)Scott, Jonathan. England's Troubles : Seventeenth-century English Political Instability in

European ContextStone, Lawrence. The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. London: Routledge,

1986.Todd, Margo, ed., Reformation to Revolution. Politics and Religion in Early Modern Britain.

London: Routledge, 1994.Underdown, David. A Freeborn People. Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century

England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.Waller, Maureen. 1700 Scenes from London Life. New York/London: Four Walls Eight

Windows, 2000.Wrightson, Keith. English Society 1580-1680. London: Routledge, 1982.

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Metaphysical Poetry

Dr. Samuel Johnson:

“... wit, abstraked from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”

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Metaphysicals rediscovered

T.S. Eliot: Traditional and the Individual Talent:“A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”

Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed. (1886–1960). Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th C. 1921.

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JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)

- Catholic- Studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Lincoln‘s

Inn, but was not allowed to take an exam- womanizer and sunny boy- 1596/7 military expedition to Spain- 1598 secretary of Sir Thomas Egerton (later "Lord

Keeper of the Great Seal" (Lordsiegelbewahrer)) - 1601 elected into the Parliament- Clandestine marriage to Anne More

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“THE FLEA” by John Donne

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,How little that which thou deniest me is;It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.Thou know'st that this cannot be saidA sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

Yet this enjoys before it woo,And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;And this, alas! is more than we would do.

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O stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, yea, more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that self-murder added be,And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

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Cruel and sudden, hast thou sincePurpled thy nail in blood of innocence?Wherein could this flea guilty be,Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee? Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thouFind'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.'Tis true; then learn how false fears be;Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Source: Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. É. K. Chambers, ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 1-2.

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“SONG” by John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,Or who cleft the devil's foot,Teach me to hear mermaids singing,Or to keep off envy's stinging,

And findWhat wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

mandrake

A herb of the genus Mandragora, especially M. officinarum, native to Europe. It has large simple leaves, white flowers, and a thick forked root, which resembles the human form and was formerly believed to have healing and aphrodisiac properties. Family: Solanaceae.

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“SONG” by John Donne

If thou be'st born to strange sights,things invisible to see,Ride ten thousand days and nights,Till age snow white hairs on thee,Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,All strange wonders that befell thee,

And swear,No where

Lives a woman true and fair.

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If thou find'st one, let me know,Such a pilgrimage were sweet;Yet do not, I would not go,Though at next door we might meet,Though she were true, when you met her,And last, till you write your letter,

Yet sheWill be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

anti-Petrarchan; mistress‘ truthfulness is questioned; lover's complaint; enumeration of impossibilia; misogynist tradition

Source:Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 4-5.

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Metaphysical Poetry: Religious authors

George Herbert (1593-1633): The Temple (1633) Sundays observe; think when the bells do chime,

’T is angels’ music. The Church Porch.

Francis Quarles (1592-1644): Argalus and Parthenia (1629); Divine Fancies(1632); Emblems (1635)

Richard Crashaw (1613-1649): Steps to the Temple (1646); The Delights of the Muses; Carmen Deo Nostro (1652)

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695): Silex Scintillans (1650; 1655)

Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)

See http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/

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Richard CrashawThe Flaming Heart

Vpon the book and Picture of the seraphicall saint Teresa, (as she is vsvally expressed with a Seraphim biside her)

Give her the Dart for it is she (Fair youth) shootes both thy shaft and Thee Say, all ye wise and well-peirc’t hearts That live and dy amidst her darts,What is’t your tastfull spirits doe prove In that rare life of Her, and love? Say and bear wittnes. Sends she not A Seraphim at every shott? [...]By all the heav’ns thou hast in him (Fair sister of the Seraphim!) By all of Him we have in Thee; Leave nothing of my Self in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may dy. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, 1647-52

see Robert T Petersson, Art of Ecstacy. Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw, N.Y. 1974.

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Richard Crashaw (Anthony Low)In keeping with the habits of the time, these four kinds of devotion were organized

hierarchically, with sung or vocal prayer at the lowest level, contemplation at the highest, and meditation and sensible affection in between, serving as bridges for those who sought to climb the spiritual ladder toward God. In general, Protestants, at least those toward the more radical or Puritan end of the spectrum, were much more suspicious of the possibility of orderly spiritual progress than Catholics

Those who, to put it bluntly, admire sexual gratification without guilt and 'androgyny' or 'polymorphous perversity' without conventional self-control, may admire Crashaw from one restricted perspective. Those who, to put it equally bluntly, admire a pure and genuine but totally abstract and asexual religious devotion, such as the tradition of English hymnody descending from George Herbert, may admire him from another restricted perspective.

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Easter Wings by George HerbertLord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,Decaying more and more,

Till he becameMost poore:

With TheeO let me rise,

As larks, harmoniously,And sing this day Thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;And still with sicknesses and shame

Thou didst so punish sinne,That I becameMost thinne.

With TheeLet me combine,

And feel this day Thy victorie;For, if I imp my wing on Thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

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Are the poems closer to prayer than art, and therefore best read by Herbert's fellow believers and not by students of literature? If approached directly as literary texts, do the poems display worrying elements of naivety or poetical quaintness?

He worked within frameworks of idea and tradition, but was always ready to transcend and break out from them, as at the end of the 'Easter' song when conventional modes of thought are shown to 'miss' and are therefore briskly abandoned in favour of an eternal and radically unframed perspective. This paradoxical poetics, in which imaginative scope is celebrated even as it confronts the limits of the expressible.

Sweet', for example, is one of Herbert's favourite adjectives for the experience of redemption, and as he uses it in 'Virtue' it seems to be itself a 'box where sweets compacted lie'. The sweetness of the new day is a kind of purity, a virginal innocence as on the 'bridall' day, and its passing is not only 'nightfall'; it epitomizes all 'falls' into sin and morality. The terms 'art' or 'artistry' are appropriate, for this does not come about by accident; it is an intensely skilful aesthetic, which we might call a rhetoric of clarity.

George Herbert (Helen Wilcox)

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'Invention' can so easily be taken to mean poetic ingenuity, those very 'trim' ideas referred to in the first stanza, but the original meaning of inventio in

rhetoric was discovery; the poet's invention was not to originate but to uncover or reveal meanings. This shifting of the centre of poetic skill from

witty novelty to revelation is, of course, … progress.

This may be invention in the familiar sense of wit or ingenuity, but it enacts the other kind of 'invention' - the almost sacramental showing forth of the gains to be made from a word, especially 'the Word', when it is poetically

fragmented as well as discovered whole.

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Andrew Marvell

To his Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,This coyness, lady, were no crime.We would sit down and think which wayTo walk, and pass our long love's day;Thou by the Indian Ganges' sideShouldst rubies find; I by the tideOf Humber would complain. I wouldLove you ten years before the Flood;And you should, if you please, refuseTill the conversion of the Jews.My vegetable love should growVaster than empires, and more slow.An hundred years should go to praiseThine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;Two hundred to adore each breast,But thirty thousand to the rest;An age at least to every part,And the last age should show your heart.For, lady, you deserve this state,Nor would I love at lower rate.

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But at my back I always hearTime's winged chariot hurrying near;And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.Thy beauty shall no more be found,Nor, in thy marble vault, shall soundMy echoing song; then worms shall tryThat long the long preserv'd virginity,And your quaint honour turn to dust,And into ashes all my lust.The grave's a fine and private place,But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may;And now, like am'rous birds of prey,Rather at once our time devour,Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.Let us roll all our strength, and allOur sweetness, up into one ball;And tear our pleasures with rough strifeThorough the iron gates of life.Thus, though we cannot make our sunStand still, yet we will make him run.