Mordechai Feingold

Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age.

Works written and published in Latin by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers covered a vast range, from brief poetic trifles to massive scholarly, humanist and scientific treatises. Among its authors were some of the greatest intellects of the day; and study of Latin dedications and commendatory verses makes clear the importance of Latinate culture in the Court as well as in the universities and learned professions. English renaissance Latin culture was the shared intellectual background for all educated people, Englands bridge to the scientific, literary, political, philosophical and religious life of continental Europe. J.W. Binns has examined almost all the numerous books written in Latin and printed in England during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ICEJE)is the result of over 25 years labour - the first comprehensive overview of the Latinate culture of England, which was the counterpart, on a higher intellectual level, of the better-known contemporary achievements in the English vernacular. It discusses various aspects of the Latin poetry of Renaissance England (seven chapters); Latin drama, and its attackers and defenders; translations into Latin from Greek and from European vernaculars; treatises on such disparate subjects as translation theory, the soul, swimming, and humanist historiography and biography; writings on theology; legal studies; and the physical sciences. Treatments vary, from the close study of significant individuals (such as Case and Rainolds) to broader surveys, for example, of Latin style. Latin quoted in the main text is accompanied by English translation. The extensive reference section contains a tripartite Bibliography, of manuscripts, books printed before 1751, and books and articles printed after 1750; a Biographical Register of around 1000 entries; and an Index of Modern Authors, followed by a detailed General Index. ICEJE is a treasure-house of ideas and material for all researchers into Elizabethan and Jacobean literary culture. It is an essential handbook for students of English literature, renaissance scholars, cultural historians, latinists, librarians and bibliographers.

Projectors and learned projects in early modern England

ABSTRACT Commenting in 1692 on the “Projecting Humour that now reigns” in England, Daniel Defoe nicknamed the period the “Projecting Age.” He dated its start to c. 1680, even as he conceded that “it had indeed something of life in the time of the late Civil War” as well. Defoe was wrong. Decades earlier both Elizabethan and Jacobean commentators had inveighed against the rampant passion for schemes, a perception increasingly documented by scholars. For the most part, however, the appraisal of early modern projects has been confined to the domain of economic and social history. Monopolies, inventions, plans to ameliorate the condition of the poor and infirm, and schemes guaranteeing the enrichment of the nation, have drawn the attention of historians; only sporadic attention has been paid to the numerous scholarly projects that also proliferated during the same period. My intention here is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a snapshot of the large number of proposals that sought to establish new institutions of higher learning, usually through substantial outlays of public capital.

And Knowledge Shall Be Increased: Millenarianism and the Advancement of Learning Revisited

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) introduced an ingenious and daring exegesis into his apologia for secular learning. Man fell, he argued in Valerius Terminus, his first philosophical essay, not for seeking the “pure light of natural knowledge,” but for presuming “to attain to that part of moral knowledge which defineth of good and evil, whereby to dispute God’s commandments and not to depend upon the revelation of his will.” Consequently, far from proscribing innocent inquiries into nature, God actually “framed the mind of man as a glass capable of the image of the universal world, joying to receive the signature thereof as the eye is of light … And although the highest generality of motion or summary law of nature God should still reserve within his own curtain, yet many and noble are the inferior and secondary operations which are within man’s sounding.” Indeed, since God authored all knowledge, its dissemination and thriving is guaranteed “not only by a general providence but by a special prophecy,” expressly “appointed to this autumn of the world.” Bacon turned to Daniel 12:4, where, “speaking of the latter times it is said, Many shall pass to and fro, and science shall be increased; as if the opening of the world by navigation and commerce and the further discovery of knowledge should meet in one time or age.”