Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem

Eleanor Davies was a great believer in historical moments. In her first work—A Warning to the Dragon and All His Angels of 1625-she told readers that “The Lord is at the Dore.”1 This immanence of God made her watchful and purposeful, reading the signs in her daily life, counting days, weeks, and years because she believed that Christ would come again. His arrival had been predestined from the beginning of the world: “from the going forth of the Commandement, which is the beginning of the Creation to the building of the New Jerusalem, the second comming of Messiah, the Prince the Sonne of God, it shall be Seaven Weekes or Seaven Moneths.”2 For Davies, time was elastic, but history was absolute. What the biblical prophets (in this case Ezekiel) said would come to pass, really would come to pass, but their promises were oracular; they had complete authority but were also elusive. Davies accepted this. She knew that she was living in the latter days, but when it came to God’s final judgment, “the daye and houre knoweth no man.”3 God could not be known as such and what she called knowledge was a spiritual transformation that took place when “He powreth out his Spirit upon his hand-maidens,” like herself.4 This essay uses A Warning to the Dragon and Davies’ works of the 1630s and 1640s to examine her theology

Indulgent representation: theatricality and sectarian metaphor in The Tempest

At the end of The Tempest, Prospero (or, perhaps, the actor playing him) urges the audience, ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free’ (5.1.337-8). The lines are a plea for applause, for the audience to conclude the drama happily. As the play-world dissolves into the real world, at the threshold between fiction and reality, Prospero appeals to be set free from representation. He strikes an ethical bargain in the mode of the Lord's Prayer (‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’). But, in speaking of ‘pardon’ and ‘indulgence’, he also alludes to a much maligned Catholic practice of purchased remission of sins. Thus, the audience's decision over whether or not to applaud the drama is playfully implicated in trying out a confessional attitude. Even so, the status of these ‘Catholic’ terms as wordplay means that they only flirt with sectarian resonance, rather than declaring a theological message. Taking the play's self-conscious theatricality as a starting point, this essay explores the ambiguity of this epilogue. It questions what it means for a post-Reformation audience to ‘indulge’ in metaphorically ‘Catholic’ behaviour, and how a play that stages forgiveness as a form of revenge negotiates difference ethically. These themes are part of a broader theatrical dynamic in which representation is constantly destabilised. The essay offers a case-study of the significance of equivocally Catholic material in post-Reformation drama, suggesting that as much attention needs to be paid to dramaturgy as to theology

Bad faith in All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well That Ends Well is a complicated and disturbing play that has a comic ending, but which seems anything but a comedy with a forced marriage based on bed-trickery between the reluctant Bertram and the feisty and witty Helena. Unsurprisingly, audiences have tended to side with Helena and the play has been classified as a “problem comedy” ever since William Lawrence identified this particular group of Shakespeare plays nearly a century ago. I want to argue in this essay that the play might better be classified as an “equivocation” play alongside Macbeth, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida and that the anxieties about fidelity, honesty and truthfulness in marriage need to be read in terms of the fear of religious tolerance/intolerance which dominated religious politics in the early years of James’s reign before the passing of the Oath of Allegiance (1606). The play is notable for its interest in chop logic, which the clown in particular displays throughout the play, a counterpoint to the arguments of Bertram and Helena who want very different things, but who are bound together as future husband and wife. Although the language of treason and treachery is used throughout, the play is less interested in answering the question of how far one can trust a stranger within than the issue of how far one can accommodate the needs of others. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death

Le journal poetique de la guerre parisienne, dedié aux conservateurs du roy, des loix, & de la patrie

Вых. дан. в колофонеMoreau176

When Catholics Attack. The Counter-Reformation in Fractured Regions of Europe (discussiedossier over Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520-1635)

Pollmann, Judith, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1520-1635 (Past and Present; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, xiv + 239 blz., ISBN 978 0 19 960991 8).This review looks at Judith Pollmann’s Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1520-1635 in a number of contexts, but particularly the one supplied by the British Isles’ experience of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Following the line taken in Professor Pollmann’s account of the reaction against Calvinism in this period, it argues that if one wants to see what the sharp edges of the Counter-Reformation look like, then one should look at the regions of Europe which experienced conflict over faith. The Netherlands was one such area; the British Isles was another. The latter has more often than not been ignored by accounts of the European reaction to the Reformation. I want to suggest that it is of real relevance to put the two together and see what can be made of the similarities and differences between them

Quelques Mots Au Sujet D\u27Une Innovation Dans La Nomenclature Botanique

Volume: 5Start Page: 37End Page: 3

The phenomenon of conversion Change of religion to and from Catholicism in England, 1580-1625

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX96959 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo