Reid Barbour

Deciphering Elizabethan fiction

This work traces the rising star of prose in the era just before the novel began to dominate literary culture. Barbour explores the favorite tropes and terms deployed by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker in their efforts to define, liberate, and question the boundaries and the very nature of prose.

The Power of the Broken: Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Aphoristic Writing

abstract: An analysis of the generic affiliations and mixtures of Religio Medici helps make sense of certain features of its dazzling intricacies, but it does not consider the shape of the eight extant manuscripts. Especially in two manuscripts whose provenance is linked closely to Browne himself, the text of Religio Medici is broken into smaller portions of prose than are found in the print editions from 1642 onward. Furthermore, in the first manuscript stage of composition and the 1643 authorized edition, Browne divides his meditations by numbers rather than titles. These features suggest that the mode if not the genre of Religio Medici was intended by the author and received by its earliest readers as aphoristic.

Thomas Browne, the Quakers, and a Letter from a Judicious Friend

Despite Sir Thomas Browne’s prominent (if complex) pronouncements of his commitment to the Church of England in Religio Medici, a Quaker named Samuel Duncon wrote a letter to Browne in which Duncon accentuates the sympathy between their respective spiritual tendencies. In his letter, Duncon looks past what he would consider the carnality and formality of Browne’s work and finds three seeds of spiritual wisdom that have convinced Duncon that Browne is ready to be a friend to the Friends. This essay explores the specific textual grounds for Duncon’s admiration of Religio’s complex meditations; contextualizes Duncon’s invitation to Browne for a conversation between friends; and addresses the question of whether Browne responded to this invitation. In celebrating Browne as ‘judicious’, Duncon’s letter complicates any simple understanding of the relations between orthodoxy and heresy in the mid seventeenth century, not least within the framework of an epistolary religious culture in which Browne’s own work participates.

Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau

Although the authorial names in this book’s title, Lipsius and Rousseau, indicate the considerable chronological range of this book (1589 to 1762), the rest of the title – contrary to current trends in academic publishing – tends to obscure its full scope. The lead phrase ‘philosophic pride’ is excerpted from Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), in which Jesus lambastes the Stoics over and above the other sinful pagan schools of thought; although Brooke never discusses the Milton passage, the phrase obliquely refers to what is finally a counter-narrative in the book, that is, the story of an anti-Stoicism that flourished in seventeenth-century French Augustinian thought, then assumed a more secular, Epicurean character in the transition from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. Unless meant rather loosely, the adjective ‘political’ is also too narrow for the purposes of the book, since so much time is spent on moral psychology and (albeit not as much) on theology. The opening pages of the book are a little misleading too, since Brooke briefly suggests that the book’s trajectory is toward the invention of modern democratic institutions and rights, in reverse of earlier treatments of Stoicism and the state that have been linked to Nazism and authoritarianism. Much to Brooke’s credit, no such simple arc is presented in Philosophic Pride. Instead, what makes the book such an important contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on classical reception in early modern Europe is that it offers a widely ranging, richly detailed answer to a broader question, namely, ‘Why has Neostoicism been held to be historically significant?’ Except for the word ‘modern’ Brooke’s summation of the book’s goal is clear – and impressive: ‘The principal task of this book [...] is to narrate the history of this modern encounter with some of the arguments of the Stoics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ – especially the moral and political, as against the physical and epistemological arguments – together with ‘an intertwining narrative, which is the history of anti-Stoicism across the same period and, in particular, of a distinctively Augustinian variety of anti-Stoic criticism’ (xiv). In pursuing these two interlocking narratives, Brooke is informative on (and fair toward) the scholarship that has come before him, for instance William J. Bouwsma’s seminal argument that Renaissance thought was polarized into Stoic and Augustinian tendencies. In a first chapter on Augustine’s City of God, Brooke establishes the theological basis for the far-reaching condemnation of the Stoics as arrogantly unmindful of their fallen status and need for divine grace, together with their blindness toward the proper use of the passions and their eagerness to claim absolute self-control and rational autonomy. Next Brooke focuses on those writers, especially Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius, who have long been recognized as having strong but complex relationships to ancient Stoicism. As he offers excellent close readings of these authors,

Moral and political philosophy: readings of Lucretius from Virgil to Voltaire

The interpretation of Epicurean political philosophy as embodied in the DRN has rarely proved simple. The problem begins with the Epicurean repudiation of public life accompanied by a retreat into a small group of friends who cultivate tranquillity. Against this apparently straightforward backdrop, the dense, passionate verses of Lucretius have provoked the later transmitters of Epicureanism into engaging an astonishing range of political concerns and positions. This chapter will consider four key historical moments in the interpretation of the DRN . For all their many differences, each of the four periods sponsors inventive and wide-ranging responses to the poem’s moral and political tendencies. In each case, cultural arbiters are inspired and provoked by what they posit as the poem’s tension between its passionate disruption of contemporary norms and its clarion call for a disengaged tranquillity. Construing their own age - sometimes approbatively, sometimes apprehensively - as a time of upheaval, they struggle to decide whether Lucretius offers recourse from or instigation to contemporary disorder, decadence and uncertainty. Finally, in each historical context, readers recognise that the poem’s moral and political arguments are rendered the more complex by Book 5’s extended account of civilisation. First there is Virgil’s emulation of Lucretius in the politically vexed but nonetheless Caesarean Georgics . Second, at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon engage the moral and political dimensions of Lucretius in their efforts to make sense of religio-political turmoil, wanton civil bloodshed and philosophical impasse.

Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period

The papers in this volume offer a wide range of examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.