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"Temperance England History."
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Colonial Virtue
Colonial Virtue is the first study to focus on the role played by the virtue of temperance in shaping ethical debates about early English colonialism. Kasey Evans tracks the migration of ideas surrounding temperance from classical and humanist writings through to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century applications, emphasizing the ways in which they have transcended the vocabularies of geography and time.
Colonial Virtue offers fresh insights into how English Renaissance writers used temperance as a privileged lens through which to view New World morality and politically to justify colonial practices in Virginia and the West Indies. Evans uses
literary texts, including The Fairie Queene and The Tempest , and sources such as sermons, dictionaries, and visual artifacts, to navigate alliances between traditional semantics and post-colonial political criticism. Beautifully written and deeply engaging, Colonial Virtue also models an expansive methodology for literary studies through its close readings and rhetorical
analyses.
eBook
Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature
This 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.
Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
eBook
Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Literature in History)
This 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. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.
eBook
The Bousfield Diaries
Diaries of a Victorian wife and mother, active in local society, paint a fascinating picture of provincial life at the time.
eBook
Politics of alcohol
Questions about drink - how it is used, how it should be regulated and the social risks it presents - have been a source of sustained and heated dispute in recent years. In The politics of alcohol, newly available in paperback, Nicholls puts these concerns in historical context by providing a detailed and extensive survey of public debates on alcohol from the introduction of licensing in the mid-sixteenth century through to recent controversies over 24-hour licensing, binge drinking and the cheap sale of alcohol in supermarkets. In doing so, he shows that concerns over drinking have always been tied to broader questions about national identity, individual freedom and the relationship between government and the market. He argues that in order to properly understand the cultural status of alcohol we need to consider what attitudes to drinking tell us about the principles that underpin our modern, liberal society. The politics of alcohol presents a wide-ranging, accessible and critically illuminating guide to the social, political and cultural history of alcohol in England. Covering areas including law, public policy, medical thought, media representations and political philosophy, it will provide essential reading for anyone interested in either the history of alcohol consumption, alcohol policy or the complex social questions posed by drinking today.
eBook
The sanctuary of sobriety: the emergence of temperance as a feminine virtue in Tudor and Stuart England
This study examines the reasons why temperance was viewed as an appropriate virtue for women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It makes use of contemporary literature to document shifts in attitudes toward women who drank in a public and conspicuous fashion, and examines the economic and cultural changes that contributed to those shifts. The literature consulted in this study would suggest that up until the first decades of the sixteenth century men and women both enjoyed considerable freedom as to where and when they might consume alcohol, and would further suggest that it was only during the economic and social crises of the early modern period that two distinct drinking cultures started to emerge, one centred in the home and exclusive of men, the other centred outside the home and exclusive of women. The emergence of temperance as a virtue specific to women happened to occur at a time when real wages were in sharp decline, and effectively sanctioned the redistribution of household income in favour of men, whose right to drink was never seriously challenged. Criticism of women who drank in a public and conspicuous fashion also happened to coincide with the rediscovery of classical texts commending the supposed temperance of the women of early Rome.
Journal Article
Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies' Campaign Against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690–1720
The societies for the reformation of manners, driven by volunteers' desires to eradicate immorality, operated in cities across England from the 1690s to the 1730s. This article uses a previously ignored source: the recognizance, to show that prostitutes' clients were targeted in their campaigns. Although the thousands of female prostitutes arrested have rightly absorbed historians' attention until now, their male clients also deserve notice. London's recognizances reveal that hundreds of elite and middling men were arrested for consorting with lewd women. This contradicts previous theories that the reformation of manners movement was an episode in policing the poor, and was concerned only with female sexuality. The evidence shows that prostitutes' clients were greatly disturbed by the campaigns, violently resisting arrest, attempting to bribe officials to spare them, or indulging in elaborate ruses to ensure that their whoring could remain undetected. These forms of opposition to the societies underscore the success of the moralists in infiltrating wealtheir men's sex lives. The arrests of these men expose a key period in the history of sexuality: the transition from seeing prostitutes as sexual predators to perceiving them as victims, and the growing expectations of the middling sort for chastity in men as well as women.
Journal Article