William J. Scheick

Paine, Scripture, and authority : the age of reason as religious and political idea

This study discloses the intellectual context and the personal pretext of Thomas Paines assault on religion in The Age of Reason. Illustrated.

Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic and Other Supernatural Visitations

During the Renaissance, animals provided more than a source of food, clothing, medicine, labor, and companionship. They also “reflected human values, virtues, and conduct in heralds, symbols, [and] emblems.”1 The Renaissance artistic use of animals to represent specific virtues and vices—particularly as disseminated by Martianus Capella, Alanus ab Insulis and Cesare Ripa—derived from a long tradition of assumptions and associations that had been forged during classical antiquity (in Aesop’s beast fables, for example) and then allegorically embellished during the Middle Ages (in the Bestiaries, among other works). Reflecting this heritage, for instance, Renaissance art commonly relied on the horse to stand for unconscious desires, the cat for liberty (free will), the lamb for gentleness or patience, the dog for faithfulness or memory, and the songbird for spiritual detachment from the material world.

The Parenthetical Mode of Whitman's "When I Read the Book"

Reads Whitman’s “When I Read the Book” as a grammatically daring poem in which Whitman’s extensive use of the parenthetical construction traces the poet’s progression of mind.

Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606–1676 (review)

veals a memory of African heritage that has heretofore remained unexamined. It is this sort of attention to the details of Wheatley’s aesthetic sensibilities that makes this book invaluable to Wheatley studies specifically, and eighteenth-century American poetics in general. The rest of the book further defines Wheatley’s poetics of liberation, tracing her religious development and her deep understanding of theology and classical learning. But Shields also presents readers with a subtle examination of Wheatley as an early romantic poet, specifically citing her treatment of nature, memory, the imagination, and the sublime. His treatment of Wheatley’s romanticism comes in the final chapter, “Intellectual Development,” and it is a thoroughly convincing and compelling part of Shields’s book that highlights Wheatley’s command of classical texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as her understanding of seventeenthand eighteenth-century philosophical movements that impacted the aesthetics of her poetry. Wheatley is revealed to have wrestled with the cultural influences of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Addison, as well as a pantheon of intellectuals of the period attempting to define the nature of the imagination and “enthusiasm.” And when it comes down to questions of reason versus imagination (or “fancy”), Wheatley came down on the side that the romantics would adopt and Shields reveals the ways in which she anticipates the movement in America. The way he handles his material here is excellent, but Shields also alludes to his forthcoming book Wheatley and the Romantics as a source for an even more thorough treatment of the subject, which I can already vouch will be another welcome contribution to Wheatley studies.

Floral Images from Childhood

garden, write about flora, and photograph flowers—the last coming close to an agreeable obsession. The result, both in the garden and in commercial publications, should be ample satisfaction. Yet sometimes, I find, digging into the nature of my plant love is as compulsive as cultivating actual dirt beds or wedging into tangled undergrowth to capture an image of a wildflower.The reason why, I find, is as elusive as a perfect garden or a flawless snapshot. Fervidly apply horticultural or photographic principles, and still the upshot amounts to an experiment always subtly imperfect in one way or another. My life-answers are like that—as ever burgeoning and unpredictable as the plants attended while I kneel by my garden border, or sit at my keyboard, or crouch behind my camera. Where did my floral infatuation begin? There was no Eden-like origin for me, no lost world of green youth trailing clouds of glory in a bucolic setting. I was born and raised on a crowded, urbanized edge of Newark, New Jersey, where little of nature as such figured in our lives. My parents’ home consisted of five rooms on the second floor of a shingled house with a small, thinly grassed, and shrubless hill of dirt serving as a front lawn. A narrow, stone-covered driveway, the only space between us and our neighbor’s house, led to a detached garage in the rear. Between our house and that garage there was a little patch of earth where a few tall bushes provided a left-side barrier along the edge of our other neighbor’s driveway. Two hundred fifty square feet hardly seem conducive to developing a passion for plants. And yet this undersized plot invigorated that passion. There was, however, a memorable incident before we moved to this house from the rented flat on Nye Avenue. On the day of my kindergarten graduation in June 1947, I had received a two-foot-high Rose of Sharon as a school gift. I begged my father to plant it in the landlord’s yard. When later

Morley's your Color

no end punctuation, and then the last line, “Mean mean mean to be free” (72-73). Here, Hayden suggests the ghost-story train on the sabre track will continue to ride, each night, until the people who still need it are free. But in Hayden’s poem, the loss of individual identity to gain a sense of shared destiny is the price of the ticket. Meaning is found by becoming the ghost in the machine, but it is a machine of one’s own making, not the machinery of the dominant culture’s history.

The Captive Exile Hasteth: Increase Mather, Meditation, and Authority

About a year before the death of Oliver Cromwell and shortly before the subsequent unraveling of the Protestant regime in England, Increase Mather was keenly enthusiastic about his personal prospects. Like a number of other colonists during Cromwell’s Protectorate, he had abandoned the New for the Old World. If for many of these people reverse migration meant a return to home, for Mather the voyage to England meant an opportunity to resettle in that famed land from which his persecuted parents had been exiled. The attraction to England, as the traditional centerof cultural authority, remained strong among Puritan colonists. At first Englandwas the beloved homeland they had been forced to leave; then, under Cromwell, it was (to apply John Milton’s words) ‘‘the first [nation] that should set up a Standard for the [Reformation] recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations’’ ().1 And so ‘‘no man ought to forsake his owne countrey, but upon extraordinary cause,’’ counseled Nathaniel Ward, who had resettled in England ten years before Mather; ‘‘and when that cause ceaseth, he is bound in conscience to returne if he can’’ (). In  JohnDavenport reported that his associateWilliamHooke, teacher of the church at New Haven, planned to migrate to England ‘‘for the good of his posterity’’ (). As early as , rumors had spread of Davenport’s own imminent departure for England for medical reasons. Several years later, however, Davenport would observe that those who returned to their English homeland had placed too much confidence in Cromwellian politics. They were mistaken, he admonished, in thinking that the New England mission was completed. Increase did not yet personally know Davenport, though in a few years he would adopt the elder minister as a mentor. Increase gladly left Massachusetts Bay.Under the supervision of Samuel, an older brother, he studied at Trinity College in Dublin and, at the age of , graduated with a Master