The Letters of Lady Anne Bacon


Book Description

The letters of Lady Anne Bacon, mother of Francis Bacon, which shed light on Elizabethan politics from a female perspective.




Anne, Lady Bacon


Book Description




An Apology or Answer in Defence of The Church Of England


Book Description

Lady Anne Cooke Bacon's translation of Bishop John Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) as An Apology or Answer in Defence of the Church of England (1564) is the official defence of the Elizabethan Settlement. At once an explanation and vindication of the establishment of the English Church and an attack on the perceived failings of the Church of Rome, An Apology embodies the tensions of a polemical age. It illustrates how politics and religion were inextricably entwined in early printed books. As well as shining light on the intense controversy between Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and fellow Devon native Thomas Harding, exiled in Louvain, Lady Bacon's text and its reception foreground the critical significance of her translating expertise in presenting church history and debates through pungent, idiomatic prose. One of the lauded Cooke sisters and mother of Sir Anthony and Sir Francis, Lady Bacon combined her proven talent in languages and reform principles with an insider's knowledge of court intrigues. Although her translation disappeared from print acknowledgement for almost two centuries, it is here offered in a richly annotated edition. Explaining and contextualizing the cryptic marginalia, this edition allows twenty-first-century readers to feel the heat and apprehend the strategic importance of An Apology.




The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury


Book Description

Lady Anne Bacon Drury (1572-1624) was the granddaughter and niece of two of England's Lord Keepers of the Great Seal, Sir Nicholas Bacon and Sir Francis Bacon. Lady Anne was also the friend and patroness of John Donne and Joseph Hall; however, she deserves to be remembered in her own right. Within her massive country house, Lady Anne created a tiny painted room that she seems to have used as a kind of three-dimensional book. The walls consisted of panels of pictures and mottoes, grouped under Latin sentences. These panels can still be viewed in a Suffolk museum: Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. Some panels point to classical and Biblical sources, and to popular emblem books. The sources of other panels are more recondite, while still others are original compositions by Lady Anne. The panels exhibit a contemptus mundi theme and reflect a struggle with ambition, pride, and even despair. Some panels also appear to register carefully veiled but pointed critiques of political and religious events and figures. Lady Anne's painted closet or 'architext' is thus relevant to a wide range of early modern scholarship in various disciplines but is as yet largely unappreciated. For the first time in four hundred years, this book fully describes the closet and places it in its personal, social, intellectual, and aesthetic contexts. It argues for the painted closet's importance for understanding early modern conceptualizations of private and public spaces, and for illuminating fundamental early modern habits of seeing and reading (especially combinations of text and image). Finally, this book explores the closet as an example of the ingenious ways in which female subjectivity found ways to express itself even within the constraints of early modern patriarchal society in England.







The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 1613-1644


Book Description

The readiness of families such as this to write directly, rather than to dictate through secretaries, makes the literary outcome more personal and intimate, more expressive of inner feelings and shared sensibility. In consequence, the letters carry their own truth across the ages."




Defending the Faith


Book Description

This volume brings together a diverse group of Reformation scholars to examine the life, work, and enduring significance of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury from 1560 to 1571. A theologian and scholar who worked with early reformers in England such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Martin Bucer, and Thomas Cranmer, Jewel had a long-lasting influence over religious culture and identity. The essays included in this book shed light on often-neglected aspects of Jewel’s work, as well as his standing in Elizabethan culture not only as a priest but as a leader whose work as a polemicist and apologist played an important role in establishing the authority and legitimacy of the Elizabethan Church of England. The contributors also place Jewel in the wider context of gender studies, material culture, and social history. With its inclusion of a short biography of Jewel’s early life and a complete list of his works published between 1560 and 1640, Defending the Faith is a fresh and robust look at an important Reformation figure who was recognized as a champion of the English Church, both by his enemies and by his fellow reformers. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Andrew Atherstone, Ian Atherton, Paul Dominiak, Alice Ferron, Paul A. Hartog, Torrance Kirby, W. Bradford Littlejohn, Aislinn Muller, Joshua Rodda, and Lucy Wooding.







Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910


Book Description

This book explores the ways that families were formed and re-formed, and held together and fractured, in Britain from the sixteenth to twentieth century. The chapters build upon the argument, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, that the nuclear family form, the bedrock of understandings of the structure and function of family and kinship units, provides a wholly inadequate lens through which to view the British family. Instead the volume's contributors point to families and households with porous boundaries, an endless capacity to reconstitute themselves, and an essential fluidity to both the form of families, and the family and kinship relationships that stood in the background. This book offers a re-reading, and reconsideration of the existing pillars of family history in Britain. It examines areas such as: Scottish kinship patterns, work patterns of kin in Post Office families, stepfamily relations, the role of family in managing lunatic patients, and the fluidity associated with a range of professional families in the nineteenth century. Chapter 8 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com




The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton


Book Description

The Lithic Imagination from More to Miltonexplores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a rolethat, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination.The scale ofthe human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies.Thetexts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political,religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue.The religious orbitencompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity'stension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and varians ofProtestant andReformed belief. The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religiouspolemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers, and stonemasons.Accordingly,the multimediaarchive includes drama, lyric, and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomicaldrawings, and statues.The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoarstone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint, and silicon.The assemblage of materialsbears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism andsupersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts,elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people.All come together via the storied pathways of stoneas densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae.Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation.