Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English LiteratureThis book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. |
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... Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is abbreviated throughout as NE. All citations and translations of classical texts are from the Loeb Classical Library except where it is noted that I have modified the Loeb translation or substituted my ...
... Aristotle's works remained the core of the university curriculum. Accompanied by various medieval and early modern commentar- ies and epitomes, the Nicomachean Ethics was the major university text in ethics.2 Numerous Latin translations ...
... Aristotle's notion of ethical virtue as a “mediocrity.” Hobbes replaced the Aristotelian concept with his own supposedly more accurate iden- tification of virtue with behavior that contributed to peaceful order, which in turn entailed ...
... Aristotle's rash man. Although Aristotle contrasts rashness and cowardice as excess and defect on either side of courage, his detailed analysis of the rash man breaks down the distinction between these extremes by arguing that rash men ...
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Contents
1 | |
19 | |
Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic | 77 |
Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts | 143 |
Moderation and Excess in the SeventeenthCentury Symposiastic Lyric | 197 |
Reimagining Moderation The Miltonic Example | 253 |
Sublime Excess Dull Moderation and Contemporary Ambivalence | 285 |
Notes | 289 |
Index | 353 |