The Anabaptists

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Mary Anne Perkins

Coleridge's status as a philosopher has often been questioned. 'I am a poor poet in England,' he admitted, 'but in America, I am a great philosopher.' J. S. Mill's assertion that 'the time is yet far distant when, in the estimation of Coleridge, and of his influence upon the intellect of our time, anything like unanimity can be looked for' seems to have been justified. Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a 'logosophic' system which attempted 'to reduce all knowledge into harmony'. She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which his unifying principle is revealed. She explores the variations meanings of the term 'logos', a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought - philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting, his perceptions more acute, as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.

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Diana B. Altegoer

"Using the tools of rhetorical and poetic analysis, this study of Baconian science reveals how the construction of scientific and philosophical discourse in early-modern England cannot be separated from literary-rhetorical production and political partisanship. By calling into question the usual way of dividing disciplines into logic, rhetoric, and poetics, Bacon suggested the constructed nature of these disciplines, and of traditional forms of knowledge. Bacon did not call into being a fissure of science and the arts; rather he conceptualized a unique relationship between the two by creating an experimental (and rhetoricized) "logic" that allowed nature to shape and fashion the perceiving mind of the witness in order to advance the political fortunes of Elizabethan and Stuart England."--BOOK JACKET.

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H.R. Ellis Davidson

Tiw, Woden, Thunor, Frig... these ancient northern deities gave their names to the very days of our week. Nevertheless most of us know far more of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and the classical deities. Recent researches in archaeology and mythology have added to what was already a fairly consistent picture (largely derived from a twelfth-century Icelandic account) of the principal Scandinavian gods and godesses. This study is the work of a scholar who has long specialized in Norse and Germanic mythology. She describes the more familiar gods of war, of fertility, of the sky and the sea and the dead, and also discusses those most puzzling figures of Norse mythology – Heimdall, Balder and Loki. All these deities were worshipped in the Viking Age, and the author has endeavoured to relate their cults to daily life and to see why these pagan beliefs gave way in time to the Christian faith. **Hilda Ellis Davidson** studied Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse under the Chadwicks at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she took Firsts in English Literature and what was then known as Archaeology and Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in 1940 for a thesis on beliefs about the dead in Old Norse literature. She lectured in English Language and Literature at Royal Holloway College and BirkBeck College in the University of London, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of the Antiquaries in 1950. In 1973 she became a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she was Vice-President from 1975 until 1980. She was president of the Folklore Society from 1973 to 1976, and General Editor of the nineteen Mistletoe Books published between 1974 and 1984. She is married with two children, and ten grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge.

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Kristen Poole

"Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest"--