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’s construction of divinely ordained European political unity with the obscurities of Anglo-Norman history. It combines with real late sixteenth-century politics to form an idealised view of a Renaissance English nation, with origins and responsibilities to Europe and Christianity that long predate, and far outweigh, the aberrations of contemporary interests. 14 The Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo published a supposed fragment of the lost books of a third-century Babylonian author, Berosus, in his Commentaria (1498), in which the ‘ancient Celtic, Western European
desire. Thus the popularity of the Triumphs in sixteenth-century England provided a crucial element in the creation of the Elizabethan icon. It offered a vocabulary and a cluster of associations through which Elizabeth could be presented to her own subjects and to other European political figures as the Virgin Queen, but in a context resonant of military victory and masculine
monarchie (1551) and the Second Part of Urania. During this period, punctuated by wars between Christian and Muslim, Catholic and Protestant, European erotic romance played its part in shaping European politics and nationalist culture. Its strong chivalric element promoted notions of responsible monarchy and intolerance of tyranny, feeding the discontent with bullying and
satirist, we can imagine that, with the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene, Spenser found a balance between the caution of The Shepheardes Calender and the rashness of Complaints, a balance that Aristotle might describe as true courage. He intervenes into court politics with his allegorical defense of Walter Raleigh against the displeasure of the Queen at his secret marriage. He offers multiple opinions on European political and religious struggles with his allegorizations of the situations in France and the Netherlands. Most famously, he supports the justice of
’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 ), 142. 68 Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 195, Paglia’s emphasis. 69 For details on the pan-European
started writing when their departure was immediately in prospect. Other evidence from the text indicates that Essex was initially responding to the European political situation as it stood in winter 1597–98. Essex refers to the planned marriage of the Infanta Isabella to the Archduke Albert and their joint rule of the Spanish Netherlands; the Archduke had made the plans public by early December 1597. 20
, written by collaborative operation by members of Essex’s circle in 1594–95. Compiled like a giant commonplace book, the main body of the treatise forged exempla ‘gathered’ from classical, medieval and recent history into a rich analysis of European politics. 27 Pérez was also a representative of the particular interest in Tacitus that in England, as Laoutaris notes, has been identified as almost synonymous
the myth’: Tennenhouse, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 159–60; ‘Free and Absolute Monarchy’: James Stuart, The Trew Law of Free Monarches , in James VI and I: Political Writings , ed. Johann Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 63. For the debate about the character of Stuart absolutism, see Johann Somerville, ‘English and European Political Ideas in
The Society was inevitably enmeshed in European politics whether it acted politically or not. The Jesuit Constitutions allowed the striking of alliances with princes, but ‘alliance’ began to be interpreted as permanent residence, and proximity to certain courts led to the appearance of political support. There was a lack of long-term political insight about the
national interest, as Sidney belonged to only the second generation of English Protestants following the redistribution of wealth and political power accompanying the dissolution of the monasteries. Like Languet, he saw the urgency of forming a counterbalancing Protestant League amid a European political landscape that was precariously at war with itself