Kathye on Thomas More

Thomas More (Kathye Macias-Ramirez)

Thomas More was born on February 7, 1478, in London and died July 6, 1535, at the age of 57. More attended St. Anthony’s in Threadneedle Street and was also educated in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had a high reputation in the first half of Henry VII’s government. He continued his education at Oxford where he studied Latin and then continued his studies back in London in 1494 where he studied law. While a member of the Lincoln's Inn, a legal society, he sought a vocation as a monk in the Carthusian monastery for four years. More, however, then went on to marry Joan Colt in either late 1504 or early 1505 but, over all of this time, and until the end of his life he was devoted to center his life around God, thru reading and practice. In 1510 he became one of the two undersheriffs of London and remained in that position until July 1518. During this time, in 1511, his wife passed, leaving behind four children which passed on to the care of Alice Middleton who married More weeks later. Middleton had a daughter, but her and More had no children together. Also during his time as an undersheriff, in 1516 he published his most recognized work ‘Utopia’. Utopia illustrates a “communist city-state in which the institutions and policies are entirely governed by reason” which were meant to contrast the reality of European politics while also discussing the topics of “penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism, divorce, euthanasia, and women’s rights” (Marc’hadour). In 1521 he was knighted and made under-treasurer, in which he “welcomed foreign envoys, delivered official speeches, drafted treaties, read the dispatches exchanged between the king and Wolsey, and answered in the king’s name” (Marc’hadour). Two years later he was elected speaker of the House of Commons. After his move to Chelsea in 1524, he was given the title of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and later lord chancellor in 1529. In November, a month later, More opened Parliament which held discussions over the divorce and remarriage of Henry VIII and by 1531 the clergy decided that the king was allowed to go ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’ (Marc’hadour). This then leads the church of England to give up their power to “legislate” if it did not have the assent of the king. More did not attend the ceremony but was asked to declare “the king’s marriage with Catherine void and that with Anne valid” his refusal to go along with the king cost him his freedom and his life (Marc’hadour). His objections only made the testimony of Thomas Cromwell more plausible, in which he states that More “denied the king’s title as supreme head of the Church of England” (Marc’hadour). Before being beheaded he told the crowd that “he was dying.... ‘in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant and God’s first’” (Marc'hadour). Throughout his life, More was seen as a pure religious man that is described by Erasmus as a ‘man of all seasons’ and is now known as a saint for his actions.

This "find the love" thing

https://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/shakespeare-in-love

Find the Love

This general presentation topic enables you to help us understand something significant about our class theme that we wouldn't normally see--except for you.  I hope that makes sense. 

There are several possible avenues here, but let me mention these.

1.  A writer, text, or general concept about love from the time period we're in with Shakespeare or the eras beforehand, i.e.: ancient, medieval, early modern.  The trick is to find something SPECIFIC that MATTERS and that you can cover or illustrate in FIVE MINUTES.

Ovid, Ars amatoria (see example): an important idea or passage.
Andreas Capellanus, De amore (or, sometimes, The Art of Courtly Love): important idea or passage.
The troubadours (pick one).
1 Corinthians 13, William Tyndale translation
Plato, Phaedrus, or something devoted to love
"courtly love," fin'Amors, l'amour courtois
Chaucer, Troilus and Creseyde
Neoplatonism
Edmund Spenser, Four Hymns

2.  Something scholarly, NOT WIKIPEDIA, on classical, medieval, or early modern conceptions of love.

3. Something visual or musical about love from the time period.

4.  Something from our play or another play by Shakespeare that demonstrates something about love, something that the rest of us won't notice unless you let us know.

5. Your idea.

Walter Cohen on Sonnet 7

https://goo.gl/images/Yx67yU

Walter Cohen on Sonnet 73

In the introduction to our book, The Norton Shakespeare (3E), the scholar Walter Cohen explains in some detail how this famous sonnet works. He analyzes how each quatrain "pursues a different metaphor" to make an argument: autumn, twilight, a dying fire, each equivalent to aging, ending, and death, respectively. He also notes that these cycles in the poem have no transition or completion. There's no winter or spring to follow the fall, night and morning to follow dusk, or a new fire from the old one. But they are all connected somehow to emphasize the mood of the person speaking in the poem and the sadness he is trying to convey. 

Cohen emphasizes the many facets of Shakespeare's words: "leaves" are from a tree and the pages of a book, "choirs" to groups of birds or gatherings of pages, and the importance of the "glowing" of the fire. It's dying, but still alive. Oddly, "Life and death have the same source."

Norton Shakespeare (1790-91)

Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Sonnet 116, misnumbered 119, in the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets

This is probably one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets because it seems to talk about love in a complex and offhand way and then concludes with a fairly simple point that some people can relate to, but that not many people can fulfill in a relationship. Like most of his other poems in the sequence, it is in the English sonnet form with three quatrains, a couplet, and seven rhymes.  It makes two interlocking rhetorical breaks: 12 and 2, the three quatrains answered by the couplet, and 8 and 6, the first two quatrains forming an octet that the sestet, the third quatrain joined with the couplet, expands on.

In this sonnet, the first four lines seem to say that "true" or faithful minds join together and don't try to change what is distinctive about the other person. But then things get more intense. The second quatrain uses two metaphors to stress how central and unshakable love should be: a sea mark and a star that one should navigate by. Love is then personified in relation to Time, and again emphasizes how permanent it should be, with the final couplet expressing an inarguable proposition: if I'm wrong, and proved wrong, I never wrote and nobody loved. However, since clearly he wrote and people have loved, then he can't be wrong.

It would be interesting to see how much this extreme position applies to the Sonnets and the plays generally.  Much of the poem tries to tell us what love is NOT.  What it is NOT is transitory, subject to "impediments" or "alteration," or alterable in any way. The language is extreme: "beares it out euen to the edge of doome," or Judgment Day; "neuer shaken" or challenged.  But love changes all the time, doesn't it?

Ovid, _Ars Amatoria_

Ovid, Ars Amatoria

9th century manuscript of the Ars amatoria

Ovid (43 BCE-17CE) was probably the most influential ancient writer in early modern England and in Europe generally.  He is best known as the author of the Metamorphoses, that unconventional epic that helped teach the West its classical mythology and that was a staple in the schools.  The Ars was his most controversial work, a mock-didactic treatise about how to deal with the opposite sex. Ovid considered it a joke, but some people took it seriously and for this, he was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea and died there. Medieval writers considered it an authority of love, a handbook of seduction, a misogynist encyclopedia, all three at once, or none of these.

The first two books of the Ars teach young men how to woo, seduce, and then keep the interest of the woman of their choice. The third section turns things around and tells women what men's devices are, and encourages them to seek love on their terms. A followup text, also considered a joke by some, was the Remedia Amoris: "the remedy for love," or how to fall out of love.

Though we tend to see love as glorious and wonderful and nasty and such, ancient, medieval, and early modern readers often viewed it as a disease, trouble, a breaker of alliances and a destroyer of happiness and households. 

The Ars has its bawdy and libertinish elements, and some think this is why Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus. Sometimes it seems hard and cynical.  It seems to suggest that men should be fairly amoral in their pursuit of women.  The treatise focuses on sex and desire, which to Romans was interchangeable with love. It sometimes recommends deceit, lying, and brands women as gullible and easy to trick. At other points, it is more reverent and humane. 

Though the Ars is about erotic love, it is certainly never crude or stupid. It discusses things like simultaneous orgasms and sexual positions in a coded and appropriate way, and it is amusing. 

Though it is hard to believe, the Ars was a school text in the medieval and early modern worlds. It is relatively easy Latin, amusing, and easy to relate to for younger people, who tend to be consumed with such matters. In the Middle Ages, it was frequently translated and adapted so it was important in literature and for the idea of "courtly love."

There is even a Mental Floss webpage post devoted to Ovid's "dating tips," taken from the Ars:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/51032/11-dating-tips-ovid%E2%80%99s-ars-amatoria

Main source:
http://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_ovid_ars.html

Picture:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=imgres&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjqgqO_8cjYAhUJGt8KHWZfAGcQjB0IBg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk%3A8180%2Fluna%2Fservlet%2Fdetail%2FODLodl~1~1~2048~102184%3AArs-amatoria%2C-and-other-poems-by-or&psig=AOvVaw0TWzJeFxo5l_aHt0DblPHz&ust=1515518766594081

Alicia on Catherine Macaulay

Catherine Macaulay (Alicia Shupe)

Catharine Macaulay

 by Robert Edge Pine circa 1775 (npg.org.uk)

Lived 1731-1791, and was England’s first female historian. Like many other women in the Enlightenment, Macaulay was educated at home under the tutelage of her governess. However, her curiosity eventually surpassed that abilities of her tutor, and she took to her father’s library to continue her own education. Her father’s volumes on the history of the Greeks and Romans are credited with sparking her interest in history, patriotism, and freedom. Macaulay began writing her histories with the encouragement of her first husband, George Macaulay, in 1760. The first volume of A History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line was published in 1763, and the next three volumes appeared in 1765, ’67, and ’68. Volume five was delayed until 1771 as Macaulay’s publication method changed. Volumes six and seven did not appear until 1781 and 1783 respectively. At that time, they were released under a slightly different title: A History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution.

In addition to her historical volumes, Macaulay also published Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society in 1767 as a response to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes. In 1777, while travelling to France, she wrote A History of England, from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson. Rev. Wilson had become a close friend of Macaulay’s and had even adopted her daughter after her husband passed away in 1766; however, the friendship ended abruptly in 1778 with Wilson’s disapproval of her second husband, William Graham, who was twenty-six years Macaulay’s junior. Macaulay’s last works to be published were her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth in 1783, and her Letters on Education and response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France each of which were published in 1790, just one year before her death.

Macaulay’s Letters on Education has been acknowledged as a major influence on Mary Wollstonecraft having been published only five years before Wollstonecraft’s own Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Catherine Gardner writes in her essay “Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: Odd but Equal” that “…although the germ for the radical social reforms of the Vindication can be traced back to [Macaulay’s] Letters…” her feminism is not truly realized without Wollstonecraft’s emphasis as Macaulay was “less radical in her view of the conditions necessary for social reform.” (119). It is, perhaps, the effect of this muted radical feminism which has obscured Macaulay’s contributions behind those of the more famous Wollstonecraft.

Sources:

Britannica.com

Gardner, Catherine. “Catharine Macaulay's ‘Letters on Education’: Odd but Equal.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 118–137. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3810609.

Plato.stanford.edu

Rachel on the Gordon Riots

The Gordon Riots (Rachel Vachon)

Information sources:

www.londonhistorians.org/index.php?s=file_download&id=45

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-gordon-riots-of-1780-london-in-flames-a-nation-in-ruins

Images:

http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/images/larger/09532.jpg

http://markcnewton.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/4659438839_bfb26987df_b.jpg

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/images/rise_parliament/sp37-20f1289.gif

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/LordGeorgeGordon.jpg

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/images/rights/wo34-103p100.jpg

Outline:

Political climate of the time

            Economic crisis: cost of living was too high

            Fighting a losing war with the United States

            Dissatisfaction with the Justice system and prisons

What sparked the outrage

            Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1778

            Protestant Association blocked the Act in Scotland

            Lord George Gordon decides to petition the Act in England as well

Who is Lord George Gordon?

            29-year-old former naval lieutenant

Widely considered to have been a little crazy

Harrassed the House of Commons for months about the Act

Friday, June 2, 1780

            Gathered at St. Georges Fields then marched on to London; 60,00 - 120,00 people

            The House decided not to vote on the matter and refused Gordon’s petition

            Widespread violence followed; destruction of a Roman Catholic chapel

A week of terror

            Sunday up through Monday; mass-houses were looted and destroyed, church property was set on fire in alleyways, Catholic schools and homes were invaded and ransacked; riotors began to attack lawmakers and police officers as well

Tuesday; foot soldiers arrive in England, but rioting continues; anger shifts from Catholics to any and all signs of State power; burning of Newgate Gaol

‘Black Wednesday’; The King announces that the military has the right to “shoot and kill without the need of magistrates”; Carnage ensued - anywhere from 200 - 300 rioters were shot dead in the streets

Thursday; all shops shut down as rioting continued, but began to wane

By Friday, the riots were considered to be over, but the city of London was left in absolute ruin; “destroyed ten times more property than was destroyed in Paris during the entire French Revolution”

The aftermath

            London remained under military occupation for months

            Lord George Gordon was tried for treason, but was found not guilty and acquitted

            Many of the rioters who were arrested were forced to serve as foot soldiers for the military in Africa