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John of Salisbury (c. 1120–80) is a key figure of the twelfth-century renaissance. A student at the cosmopolitan schools of medieval Paris, an associate of Thomas Becket and an acute commentator on society and rulership, his works and letters give unique insights into the political culture of this period. This volume reassesses the influence of classical sources on John’s political writings, investigating how he accessed and used the ideas of his ancient predecessors.
By looking at his quotations from and allusions to classical works, O’Daly shows that John not only borrowed the vocabulary of his classical forbears, but explicitly aligned himself with their philosophical positions. She illustrates John’s profound debt to Roman Stoicism, derived from the writings of Seneca and Cicero, and shows how he made Stoic theories on duties, virtuous rulership and moderation relevant to the medieval context. She also examines how John’s classical learning was filtered through patristic sources, arguing that this led to a unique synthesis between his political and theological views.
The book places famous elements of John’s political theory - such as his model of the body-politic, his views on tyranny - in the context of the intellectual foment of the classical revival and the dramatic social changes afoot in Europe in the twelfth century. In so doing, it offers students and researchers of this period a novel investigation of how Stoicism comprises a ‘third way’ for medieval political philosophy, interacting with – and at times dominating – neo-Platonism and proto-Aristotelianism.
interplay of work, domestic and personal factors. This led to stress very often being not only unacknowledged but unacknowledgeable. James’ apparent inability to connect his overwork and his symptoms reflects a norm of coping and stoicism that, in the earlier part of the century particularly, often resulted from economic necessity and a survivalist approach that ensured that any stressful experiences had to go unacknowledged. Stoicism privileged suffering in silence and privacy and was the norm in the face of distress for much of the century. It was closely related to
. Stoicism may be a philosophy of coherence, of living in accordance with oneself (by implication, with one’s nature and with society), 8 of the good flow of life, but it is all this by virtue of its also being a philosophy of self-mastery. 9 If early modern thinkers preferred Stoic ethics to Stoic physics or logic, this was because of Stoicism’s practical, indeed instrumental
Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England both account for the ways the humoral body is embedded in an ecology that demands the management of disruptive humors. 9 Paster focuses on the threats and excesses of the ‘wriggling’ passions of the soul, while Schoenfeldt emphasizes the inherent power of an ethics of containing those unruly passions that is central to Renaissance humanism. Such representations of the body reflect the widespread influence of Galenic humoral theory and Christian neo-Stoicism on early
Arcadia in particular, written in the 1580s, ought to be read in accordance with a distinctly feminine discourse of pragmatic stoicism and principled anti-factionalism. This reading privileges the philosophy of Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister and supervisor of the publication of the 1593 edition of the Arcadia , over that of Fulke Greville, Sidney’s friend, biographer and
killed during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. While his mother maintained the stoicism demanded by society in public, in private she grieved for her son until her own death in 1940. She kept a full-size replica of the cross at the head of his grave in her bedroom, with a prayer desk in front of it. Rather than agreeing to Ceddy’s body being moved to one of the ‘concentrated’ Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) cemeteries in the years immediately following the war’s end, she paid to maintain the grave herself, buying the land and employing a local man to look after
‘It's not the bombs I'm scared of any more, it's the weariness … trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I'd die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.’ 1 This was the complaint of a female civil servant in the early days of the London Blitz, her comment reflecting the way civilian responses to war on the Home Front during the Second World War were often characterised by stoicism and even humour. 2 Such framing of people's experiences occurred both
work's meaning informed how people understood experiences of work-related stress, and for many meant that it simply could not be acknowledged, only endured, or hidden behind a physical proxy, and this fitted with an expectation of stoicism that was commonplace at the time. Equally difficult to acknowledge was the fact that the achievement of a new, sanitary, spacious, suburban home might lead to nervous conditions rather than contentment. Much research into neurosis at work focused on men, but Taylor's suburban neurosis diagnosis referred
The truest test of Sidney’s legacy of anti-factionalism would have been to provide a guiding philosophy at the time when court politics was at its most polarized. In such circumstances, which, arguably, the 1590s were for Elizabethan courtiers, Sidney’s ethos would have been invaluable. As we saw in Chapter One , and as I show in this chapter, Sidney’s sophisticated, textually mediated relationship with his monarch has the potential to mitigate difficult political situations. Sidney’s discourse of pragmatic Stoicism and principled anti-factionalism, associated
. 16–17. All future references to Herbert’s Life in this chapter are from this edition, unless otherwise stated. 2 The Autobiography , ed. Lee, 2nd revd edn (1906), p. xii. 3 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 6.2, trans. Robert Drew Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925 ), vol. 2, p. 65. 4 Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought