The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of JohnsonIn The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, Jack Lynch explores eighteenth-century British conceptions of the Renaissance, and the historical, intellectual, and cultural uses to which the past was put during the period. Scholars, editors, historians, religious thinkers, linguists, and literary critics of the period all defined themselves in relation to 'the last age' or 'the age of Elizabeth'. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to cultural as well as literary historians of the eighteenth century. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Struggling to emerge from barbarity historiography and the idea of the classic | 20 |
Learnings triumph historicism and the spirit of the age | 40 |
Call Britannias glories back to view Tudor history and Hanoverian historians | 59 |
The rage of Reformation religious controversy and political stability | 80 |
The groundwork of stile language and national identity | 99 |
Studied barbarity Jonson Spenser and the idea of progress | 122 |
The last age Renaissance lost | 145 |
Notes | 167 |
200 | |
221 | |
Common terms and phrases
Addison age of Elizabeth age of Johnson allegory ancient antiquity appeared Ascham authors barbarous Ben Jonson Boswell C. S. Lewis calls canon Chaucer Church civil classical contemporaries corruption Critical Heritage culture Dark Ages diction discussion Dryden edition Edmund Spenser eighteenth eighteenth-century eighteenth-century critics elegance Elizabethan English Poetry epic Erasmus Essay Faerie Queene French golden age Gothic Greek Henry historians historiography History of England History of English Hooker Hughes humanists Hume Hurd imitation important instance Italian John Joseph Warton last age Latin Letters lines linguistic literary history literature Lives London medieval metaphors Middle Ages Milton modern notes Paradise Lost past period Petrarch Poems poetic political Poliziano Pope Pope's praise Preface privative progress Prose purity quotations Rambler Rapin refinement Reformation religion religious Renaissance Restoration revival of learning Romantic Samuel Johnson Scaliger seventeenth century Shakespeare sixteenth century Smollett Spenserian sublime texts Thomas Warton tongue Tudor vols words writes