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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 84
... moral guides about precisely how much mourning was appropriate.19 More significantly, the mean's imprecision encouraged polemical manipula- tion and aroused hermeneutic suspicion. In his Rhetoric, when he is concerned with rhetorical ...
... moral essayist William Cornwallis, moderation separated legitimate power from “tyranny” and “temper[ed] ... the whole frame of the world”; without moderation, “extremes” would “ruine all.” Commonplace wis- dom held that both monarch and ...
... morality of their religious critics. Yet the Sons of Ben also revive an ancient symposiastic motif ignored by Jonson: the anti-Aristotelian identification of heavy drinking itself with moderation insofar as it curtails unruly desires ...
... moral discipline and the source of truest pleasure. Adam and Eve's pleasurable restraint is grounded in their virtuous self-respect, repre- sented as an Aristotelian mean and applicable in distinctive ways to husband and wife. Milton ...
... moral vision unavailable to Donne and incapable of explaining the most pow- erful evil forces of his world.5 By contrast, in “Satire 3” Donne transforms the ancient mean to undergird his search for “true religion” in his own world of ...
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 |