Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Cult

---

The literature of Anglo-Saxon England is unique among contemporary European literatures in that it features a vast amount of saints' Lives in the vernacular. Using a wide variety of literary, historical and archaeological evidence, she argues that the first perceptions of Arabs, Ismaelites and Saracens which derived from Christian exegesis preconditioned wester expressions of hostility and superiority towards peoples of the Islamic world, and that these received ideas prevailed even as material contacts increased between England and Muslim territory.

Medieval texts invariably represented Muslim Arabs as Saracens and Ismaelites or Hagarenes , described by Jerome as biblical enemies of the Christian world three centuries before Muhammad's lifetime. Two early ideas in particular - that Saracens worshipped Venus and dissembled their own identity - continued into the early modern period. This finding has interesting implications for earlier theses by Edward Said and Norman Daniel concerning the history of English perceptions of Islam.

How did the Anglo-Saxons conceptualize the interim between death and Doomsday?

In this book, Ananya Jahanara Kabir presents an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon belief in the 'interim paradise': She locates the origins of this distinctive sense of paradise within early Christian polemics, establishes its Anglo-Saxon development as a site of contestation and compromise, and argues for its post-Conquest transformation into the doctrine of purgatory. In ranging across Old English prose and poetry as well as Latin apocrypha, exegesis, liturgy, prayers and visions of the otherworld, and combining literary criticism with recent scholarship in early medieval history, early Christian theology and history of ideas, this book is essential reading for scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, historians of Christianity, and all those interested in the impact of the Anglo-Saxon period on the later Middle Ages.

This book, first published in , discusses the attitudes towards Anglo-Saxons expressed by English poets, playwrights and novelists from the thirteenth century to the present day. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing literary responses to the Anglo-Saxons in the medieval period, the Renaissance and also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In earlier centuries the Ango-Saxons were often idealized representatives of happier times.

Later, they became the epitome of a 'British' race, while an individual Anglo-Saxon, King Alfred, was inflated into a national hero. A final essay suggests the disappearance of any clear sense of the cultural roots of the English in the twentieth century. The contributors, who are specialists in their respective fields from Britain and the United States, draw on works that have frequently been ignored or overlooked. They address topical issues such as nationalism, cultural identity, myth, gender and contextualization. The document offers a rare glimpse of what ordinary monks in Anglo-Saxon England were expected to know and do.

This book contains an edition of the Latin letters a textual commentary, and a complete English translation of the work. Dr Jones also provides substantial introductory chapters which establish the exceptional importance of the Eynsham letter for our understanding of late Anglo-Saxon monasticism and liturgy.

The book will interest students of early medieval culture, monasticism and Church history. This book examines descriptions of the natural world in a wide range of Old English poetry. Jennifer Neville describes the physical conditions experienced by the Anglo-Saxons - the animals, diseases, landscapes, seas and weather with which they had to contend. She argues that poetic descriptions of these elements were not a reflection of the existing physical conditions but a literary device used by Anglo-Saxons to define more important issues: Examples of contemporary literature in other languages are used to provide a sense of Old English poetry's particular approach, which incorporated elements from Germanic, Christian and classical sources.

The result of this approach was not a consistent cosmological scheme but a rather contradictory vision which reveals much about how the Anglo-Saxons viewed themselves. These glosses are shown to have played a pivotal role in the development of the vernacular as a medium for scholarly discourse. This book is a clear and accessible account of early Germanic alliterative verse which explains how such verse was treated by the Beowulf poet.

There are differences of poetic style between Beowulf and the otherwise similar verse of ancient Scandinavia and continental Europe. Such distinctions have intrigued scholars for over a century, but Russom is the first to provide a systematic explanation of Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German alliterative metres. The system of alliterative rules described by Russom derives from ordinary language; the rules change with language over historical time, rather than persisting as arbitrary restrictions.

Once the relations between language and metre are identified, it is possible to see how language change yielded the divergent metrical practices which gave each tradition its special character. Russom's results should interest scholars of Old English and related Germanic languages, as well as linguists and those concerned with poetic metre. This book explores ideas of community and the relationship of individuals to communities widely evident in Old English poetry.

It pays particular attention to the context in which major poetic manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period were received, a time when concerns about community appear to have been of special urgency. The book identifies key features of the audience or readership of Old English poetry in this period, and relates the interests of these groups of people to themes reflected in the poetic texts.

Magennis analyses a wide range of poems and examines the imagery on which they draw, concentrating particularly on depictions of hall including feasting and drinking , stronghold, city and landscape. In a poetry in which communal structures are typically associated with male ideals of warriorship and fellowship, the position and treatment of women is also shown to merit close consideration. This is an extended study of the Old Testament poems of the Junius collection as a group. The circumstances surrounding their composition and transmission are mysterious: This book seeks to breach this critical impasse by allowing the biblical content of the Junius poems to tell its own story.

Remley compares them with genuine early medieval texts that are most likely to have circulated in Anglo-Saxon centres, and sets out the full range of variants. He offers engaging exercises in hermeneutic and reader-response criticism. The introductory chapter reviews five centuries of Anglo-Saxon history.

All citations of Old English, Latin, and Greek texts are accompanied by modern English translations, making the book accessible to general readers as well as specialists.

Peter Clemoes brings a lifetime's close study of Anglo-Saxon texts to this appreciation of Old English poetry, with an alternative interpretation which relates the poetry to both the entire Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and the structures of its society. Clemoes proposes a dynamic principle of Old English poetry, very different from the common notion of formulas slotted into poems for stylistic variation.

In extended discussions of particular poems and images as well as of changes in language, he shows how the poetic medium became a vehicle for increasing transformation to Christian literacy and to that religion's conceptions of the natural world, morality, and individuality. Carefully thought out and elegantly written, this book is also accessible to students: The Laterculus Malalianus, a historical exegesis of the life of Christ, appears to be the only complete text to survive from the hand of Archbishop Theodore at Canterbury.

Its language, style and intellectual frame of reference are thus of great importance for establishing the nature and scope of teaching at Canterbury, the first school of Anglo-Saxon England. This edition, with translation and commentary, is the third volume in this series to offer a reassessment of Canterbury as a major seat of learning, together with Bernhard Bischoff's and Michael Lapidge's edition of the biblical commentaries from the Canterbury school and Michael Lapidge's edited collection of essays on the life and influence of Archbishop Theodore.

Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England

In the introduction Jane Stevenson examines the intellectual milieu of this work, argues the case for attribution to Theodore, and suggests the need for a complete rethinking of the basis of Anglo-Saxon culture. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury —90 , was a monk of Greek origin and extraordinary learning, who shaped the English Church into a structure it retained for a millennium. Yet until recently his early career has been unknown. This book builds on the publication of previously unprinted biblical commentaries from Theodore's Canterbury school, and establishes Theodore's cultural and spiritual background and the formation of his learning.

Scholars provide a fresh account of Theodore's career and writings on diverse subjects, revealing a unique personality who brought to Anglo-Saxon England the cultural heritage of Syria, Byzantium and Rome. This volume includes the first edition of a previously unknown text which throws light on the intellectual history of early medieval Europe. The biblical commentaries represent the teaching of two gifted Greek scholars who came to England from the Byzantine East. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury —90 and his colleague Hadrian d. In the early Middle Ages, formal education was limited to monastic life, but from the twelfth century new sources of education had begun to develop, with song and grammar schools.

These were usually attached to cathedrals or a collegiate church and were most common in the developing burghs.

By the end of the Middle Ages grammar schools could be found in all the main burghs and some small towns. These were sometimes described as "sewing schools", and probably taught by lay women or nuns. All this resulted in an increase in literacy, although it was largely concentrated among a male and wealthy elite, [7] with perhaps 60 per cent of the nobility being literate by the end of the fifteenth century. The humanist concern with widening education was shared by the Protestant reformers, with a desire for a godly people replacing the aim of having educated citizens.

In , the First Book of Discipline set out a plan for a school in every parish but proved financially impossible.

Renaissance in Scotland

Schools were supported by a combination of kirk funds, contributions from local heritors or burgh councils and from parents that could pay. They were inspected by kirk sessions , who checked for the quality of teaching and doctrinal purity. There were also large number of unregulated "adventure schools", which sometimes fulfilled a local need and sometimes took pupils away from the official schools.

Outside the established burgh schools, a master often combined his position with other employment, particularly minor posts within the kirk, such as clerk. The twelfth-century Renaissance resulted in the emergence of some major intellectual figures from Scotland. Probably the most significant was John Duns Scotus c. Scottish scholars continued to study on the Continent and at English universities which reopened to Scots in the late fifteenth century.

As early as some Scots were in contact with the leading figure in the northern humanist movement, the Netherlands-born Desiderius Erasmus — Andrews, Alexander Stewart c. Robert Reid , Abbot of Kinloss and later Bishop of Orkney , was responsible in the s and s for bringing the Italian humanist Giovanni Ferrario to teach at Kinloss Abbey , where he established an impressive library and wrote works of Scottish history and biography. Reid was also instrumental in organising the public lectures which were established in Edinburgh in the s on law, Greek, Latin and philosophy, under the patronage of Mary of Guise.

Access Check

They developed into the "Tounis College", which would become the University of Edinburgh in After the Reformation, Scotland's universities underwent a series of reforms associated with Andrew Melville , who returned from Geneva to become principal of the University of Glasgow in Influenced by the anti-Aristotelian Petrus Ramus , he placed an emphasis on simplified logic, elevating languages and sciences to the status enjoyed by philosophy and allowing accepted ideas in all areas to be challenged. Glasgow had probably been declining as a university before his arrival, but students now began to attend in large numbers.

The result was a revitalisation of all Scottish universities, which were now producing a quality of education the equal of that offered anywhere in Europe.

Major intellectual figures in the Reformation included George Buchanan. He taught in universities in France and Portugal, translated texts from Greek into Latin, and was tutor to the young Mary, Queen of Scots for whom he wrote Latin courtly poetry and masques. After her deposition in , his works De Jure Regni apud Scotos and Rerum Scoticarum Historia were among the major texts outlining the case for resistance to tyrants. James would debate with both Buchanan and Melville over the status of the crown and kirk. In the late fifteenth century, Scots prose also began to develop as a genre and to demonstrate classical and humanist influences.

The establishment of a printing press under royal patent from James IV in made it easier to disseminate Scottish literature. It was the first complete translation of a major classical text in an Anglian language, finished in , but overshadowed by the disaster at Flodden. Many of the makars had a university education and so were also connected with the Kirk.

However, William Dunbar 's Lament for the Makaris c. They continued medieval themes, but were increasingly influenced by new continental trends and the language and forms of the Renaissance. Stewart produced a verse version of the Latin History of Scotland compiled in by Boece [28] and Bellenden produced a prose translation of Livy's History of Rome in He produced an interlude at Linlithgow Palace thought to be a version of his play The Thrie Estaitis in , the first surviving full Scottish play, which satirised the corruption of church and state, [28] making use of elements such as medieval morality plays , with a humanist agenda.

In the s and s James VI promoted the literature of the country of his birth. His treatise, Some Rules and Cautions to be Observed and Eschewed in Scottish Prosody , published in when he was aged 18, was both a poetic manual and a description of the poetic tradition in his mother tongue, Scots , to which he applied Renaissance principles. The influence of the Renaissance on Scottish architecture has been seen as occurring in two distinct phases.

The selective use of Romanesque forms in church architecture in the early fifteenth century was followed towards the end of the century by a phase of more directly influenced Renaissance palace building. It can be seen in the nave of Dunkeld Cathedral , begun in , the facade of St Mary's, Haddington from the s and in the chapel of Bishop Elphinstone's Kings College, Aberdeen —9. These works have been seen as directly reflecting the influence of Renaissance styles. Linlithgow was first constructed under James I, under the direction of master of work John de Waltoun.

From , it was referred to as a palace, apparently the first use of this term in the country. This was extended under James III and began to correspond to a fashionable quadrangular, corner-towered Italian signorial palace of a palatium ad moden castri a castle-style palace , combining classical symmetry with neo-chivalric imagery. There is evidence of Italian masons working for James IV, in whose reign Linlithgow was completed and other palaces were rebuilt with Italianate proportions.

Similar themes can be seen in the private houses of aristocrats, as in Mar's Wark , Stirling c. The unique style of great private houses in Scotland, later known as Scots baronial , has been located in origin to the period of the s. It kept many of the features of the high walled Medieval castles that had been largely made obsolete by gunpowder weapons and may have been influenced by the French masons brought to Scotland to work on royal palaces.

It drew on the tower houses and peel towers , [44] which had been built in hundreds by local lords since the fourteenth century, particularly in the borders. These abandoned defensible curtain walls for a fortified refuge, designed to outlast a raid, rather than a sustained siege. Particularly influential was the work of William Wallace , the king's master mason from until his death in This style can be seen in lords houses built at Caerlaverlock , Moray House , Edinburgh and Drumlanrig Castle —89 , and was highly influential until the baronial style gave way to the grander English forms associated with Inigo Jones in the later seventeenth century.

From about , the Reformation revolutionised church architecture in Scotland. Calvinists rejected ornamentation in places of worship, with no need for elaborate buildings divided up by ritual, resulting in the widespread destruction of Medieval church furnishings, ornaments and decoration. Many of the earliest buildings were simple gabled rectangles, a style that continued to be built into the seventeenth century, as at Dunnottar Castle in the s, Greenock and Durness The church of Greyfriars, Edinburgh , built between and , used this layout with a largely Gothic form while that at Dirleton had a more sophisticated classical style.

A variation of the rectangular church that developed in post-Reformation Scotland was the "T"-shaped plan, often used when adapting existing churches as it allowed the maximum number of parishioners to be near the pulpit. Examples can be seen at Kemback in Fife and Prestonpans after The "T" plan continued to be used into the seventeenth century as at Weem , Anstruther Easter , Fife —44 and New Cumnock In the seventeenth century a Greek cross plan was used for churches such as Cawdor and Fenwick In most of these cases one arm of the cross was closed off as a laird's aisle, with the result that they were in effect "T"-plan churches.

We know almost nothing about native Scottish artists in the Middle Ages. As in England, the monarchy may have had model portraits of royalty used for copies and reproductions, but the versions of native royal portraits that survive from the late Middle Ages are generally crude by continental standards. These included the prayer book commissioned by Robert Blackadder , Bishop of Glasgow , between and [51] and the Flemish illustrated book of hours , known as the Hours of James IV of Scotland , given by James IV to Margaret Tudor and described as "perhaps the finest medieval manuscript to have been commissioned for Scottish use".

Surviving stone and wood carvings, wall paintings and tapestries suggest the richness of sixteenth century royal art.

Navigation menu

At Stirling Castle, stone carvings on the royal palace from the reign of James V are taken from German patterns, [53] and like the surviving carved oak portrait roundels from the King's Presence Chamber, known as the Stirling Heads, they include contemporary, biblical and classical figures. The parallel loss of patronage created a crisis for native craftsmen and artists, who turned to secular patrons. One result of this was the flourishing of Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings and walls, with large numbers of private houses of burgesses, lairds and lords gaining often highly detailed and coloured patterns and scenes.

Over a hundred examples are known to have existed, and surviving paintings include the ceiling at Prestongrange , undertaken in for Mark Kerr, Commendator of Newbattle, and the long gallery at Pinkie House , painted for Alexander Seaton , Earl of Dunfermline, in These were undertaken by unnamed Scottish artists using continental pattern books that often led to the incorporation of humanist moral and philosophical symbolism, with elements that call on heraldry, piety, classical myths and allegory.

The captivity of James I in England from to , where he earned a reputation as a poet and composer, may have led him to take English and continental styles and musicians back to the Scottish court on his release. They included John Broune, Thomas Inglis and John Fety, the last of whom became master of the song school in Aberdeen and then Edinburgh, introducing the new five-fingered organ playing technique.

Five masses and two votive antiphons have survived in his choirbook. One of the masses provides the only example of the use of the continental fashion of the cantus firmus to have survived in Britain. The antiphon "Oh Bone Jesu" was scored for 19 voices, perhaps to commemorate the 19th year of the reign of James V. His complex polyphonic music could only have been performed by a large and highly trained choir such as the one employed in the Chapel Royal. James V was also a patron to figures including David Peebles c.

These were probably only two of many accomplished composers of their times, their work surviving largely in fragments. In this era Scotland followed the trend of Renaissance courts for instrumental accompaniment and playing. Accounts indicate that there were lutanists at the court from the reign of James III and in the houses of the great lords and clergymen.

Instruments also appear in art of the period, with a ceiling at Crathes Castle showing muses with lute, bass viol , fiddle, harp, cittern , flute and clavicord , similar to a mixed consort found in England in this period. James V, as well as being a major patron of sacred music, was a talented lute player and introduced French chansons and consorts of viols to his court, although almost nothing of this secular chamber music survives.

The Reformation would severely affect church music. The song schools of the abbeys, cathedrals and collegiate churches were closed down, choirs disbanded, music books and manuscripts destroyed and organs removed from churches. The most important product of this tradition in Scotland was The Gude and Godlie Ballatis , which were spiritual satires on popular ballads composed by the brothers James , John and Robert Wedderburn.

Never adopted by the kirk, they nevertheless remained popular and were reprinted from the s to the s. Later the Calvinism that came to dominate the Scottish Reformation was much more hostile to Catholic musical tradition and popular music, placing an emphasis on what was biblical, which meant the Psalms.

The Scottish psalter of was commissioned by the Assembly of the Church.

The intention was to produce individual tunes for each psalm, but of psalms, had proper tunes and in the seventeenth century, common tunes, which could be used for psalms with the same metre, became more common. The need for simplicity for whole congregations that would now all sing these psalms, unlike the trained choirs who had sung the many parts of polyphonic hymns, [66] necessitated simplicity and most church compositions were confined to homophonic settings.

The return of James V's daughter Mary from France in to begin her personal reign, and her position as a Catholic, gave a new lease of life to the choir of the Scottish Chapel Royal, but the destruction of Scottish church organs meant that instrumentation to accompany the mass had to employ bands of musicians with trumpets, drums, fifes, bagpipes and tabors. He made statutory provision to reform and promote the teaching of music, [70] attempting to revive burgh song schools from Beginning to fall into disrepair, the Scottish Chapel Royal was now used only for occasional state visits, leaving the court in Westminster as the only major source of royal musical patronage.

The Renaissance in Scotland has been seen as reaching its peak in the first half of the sixteenth century, between the reigns of James IV and the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots. The loss of the church as a source of patronage in the s and the court in , changed and limited the further development of Renaissance ideas. In the same period civic humanism began to give way to private devotion and retreat from the world influenced by Stoicism. In art and architecture, Renaissance proportion began to give way to Mannerism and the more exaggerated style of the Baroque from about The legacy of the Renaissance can be seen in the transformation of the ruling elite in Scottish society from a warrior caste to one with more refined morals and values.

The Renaissance left a legacy across intellectual fields including poetry, historical writing and architecture, which continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with the 20th-century movement: Part of a series on the. Architecture Art The Kilt Literature.

Football Rugby union National football team Golf. Edinburgh timeline Glasgow timeline. Government in Medieval Scotland. History of education in Scotland. History of schools in Scotland.

• mini stories of justice, 7 really scary tales and lots of undeserved consequences
• Selected Poems (Borzoi Poetry)
• 26 Seelenbäume: Mein Leben mit und ohne Hundertwasser (German Edition)
• Medico a Palos (Spanish Edition)
• Technologiebasierte Chancen und Wachstum akademischer Spin-offs: Eine Untersuchung des Einflusses vo
• I Love You Beth Cooper