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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... 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.
... similarly explores the development of conflicting norms of manly behavior during the early modern period out of distinctive and “context-specific” religious and secular “codes.”40 On several counts I will take issue with Luhmann's ...
... similarly adopts the Democritean attitude when he claims that a court fop would make even Heraclitus laugh (l. 197). In one of his paradoxes, which were probably written during the same period as the satires, Donne also expresses a ...
... similarly col- lapses the distinction between the two extremes: he “seem[s] bold” in reck- lessly fighting in “forbidden warres” but is afraid to fight the spiritual battle “appointed” by God (ll. 29, 32).12 Donne's list of the various ...
... similarly deplored the “carelesse cogitations” of the irreligious philosophi- cal sect.30 Donne's Graccus, by contrast, is described as a religious libertine: loving all sects, like all women, equally much and therefore equally little ...
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 |