English Mythography in its European Context, 1500-1650

by Hartmann, Anna-Maria

• ISBN13: 9780198807704
• ISBN10: 0198807708
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-05-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Anna-Maria Hartmann, Departmental Lecturer in English Literature, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Dr Anna-Maria Hartmann is a Departmental Lecturer in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She previously held the post of Christopher Tower Junior Research Fellow in Greek Mythology at Christ Church between 2012 and 2016 after completing her doctorate in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the reception of ancient mythology in the Renaissance.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Mythography in Europe, 1500-1567
1.1. Renaissance Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Mythographies
1.2. Renewal from the Wellsprings of Universal Learning
1.3. The New Mythographies
2. Stephen Batman, Edmund Spenser, and Myth as an Art of Discernment
2.1. The First English Mythography and its European Source
2.2. A 'Strau[n]ge entermixed stratageme': Batman s Concept of Myth
2.3. The Imagined Gods of the Catholics and the Family of Love
2.4. The Images of the Ancient Gods
2.5. Edmund Spenser and Mythological Discernment in the Bower of Bliss
3. In memoriam Philip Sidney: Mythopoesis in Abraham Fraunce's Amintas Dale
3.1. The Structure and Textual History of Fraunce's Mythography
3.2. Fashionably Nebulous: Fraunce's Concept of Myth
3.3. Making Sidney into Myth
3.4. Lasting Images: Daphne's Story and the Ambiguity of Closure
4. Truth Lost in the River of Time: Francis Bacon, Prima Philosophia, and the Greek Fables
4.1. The Stem of the Tree of Knowledge
4.2. Parabolic Poetry: Bacon's Concept of Myth and its Kinship with Prima Philosophia
4.3. Allegory in De sapientia veterum
4.4. Greek Myth and Prima Philosophia in the Revised Division of Learning
4.5. Early English and European Readers of De sapientia veterum
5. While the Winds Breathe, Adore Echo: Henry Reynolds between Neo-Platonic and Protestant Poetics of Myth
5.1. Reynolds and 'the Forme and reall Essence of true Poesy'
5.2. Golden Fictions i: 'rauisht, and inflamed with diuine fury'
5.3. Golden Fictions ii: 'in a myste, blind and benighted'
5.4. Henry Reynolds and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
5.5. Narcissus and the Divinity of Poetry
5.6. Henry Reynolds, English Mythography, and the Divinity of Poetry
6. Gods Save the King: Alexander Ross's Civil Mythography
6.1. 'Shall not the very Gentiles condemn them?': Ross and the Church Robbers
6.2. 'Apollo and a King parallel'd': Mel Heliconium to the Rescue
6.3. Pansebeia and the Universal Function of Religion in a Commonwealth
7. Conclusion
7.1. Renaissance Theories of Myth?
7.2. Alexander Ross's Mystagogus Poeticus and What Happened Next
Endmatter
References
Index