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
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... notion of a virtuous mean between two vicious extremes figured crucially in the writings of educated early modern English authors. Historians and literary scholars have studied the concept's importance for the period's struggles con ...
... notion of proper “measure” (“modus”) to detail the behavior of the ideal Roman gentleman (1.25.89, 1.29.102–104, 1.35.129– 1.39.140), was frequently reprinted both in Latin and in English translations. Taught in grammar schools as well ...
... notions, Protestant min- isters and Galenic doctors alike preach the mean in conjugal love and sexual activity, diet, labor and recreation.14 Though in tension with their professed zeal in God's cause, university-trained Puritan ...
... promoted themselves as the virtuous “middle way” between (variously de- scribed) extremes.22 Early modern Englishmen similarly applied the notion of the Aristotelian mean to identify the national church as a 4 INTRODUCTION.
... 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 identifying ...
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 |