FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2334677910> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2334677910 endingPage "E19" @default.
• W2334677910 startingPage "E17" @default.
• W2334677910 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEtymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature. Hannah Crawforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+218.John K. HaleJohn K. HaleUniversity of Otago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreEtymology shares with literary interpretation the question what, and how, do words mean (vii). But how seriously should we take the word’s own claim that it gives a word’s etumos logos, its true because original sense? What about language change? What about the tendentious aspect, by which etymologizers insist that their sense is the true sense—especially when the words at issue concern matters of religion and politics? Etymology can be self-delighting and surprising. Nonetheless, religion and politics provide the words for Hannah Crawforth’s focus, through four substantial studies of Spenser, Jonson, Donne, and Milton: two reforming Protestants, and two erstwhile Catholics.The introduction explains the two-sidedness of etymology from an early modern understanding of “invention.” Inventio in rhetoric means not only what you “find” that existed already (in the present instance what a word once or originally meant). It equally means what you “find” to say, so that it is the interpretation of a word (5): means, not end. The word stock in this book is at first Old English, “reclaimed” in the chosen authors “from the precipice where it had long teetered on the brink of being lost entirely” (184). Polemical exchanges between word fanciers dwelled on words about Anglo-Saxon church order and political assemblies. Then Latin, Hebrew, and Greek come uppermost.The four poets, while often depending on linguists or lexicographers for their etymologies, vary in their exercise. Spenser (using the work of Archbishop Parker’s circle) emphasizes in his Shepheardes Calender the “familiarity of what appears to be unfamiliar, the native inheritance” of English, which “he uncovers to create a case for moderation in ecclesiastical reform” (186). In the Faerie Queene, reversely, “the rhetoric of linguistic estrangement reveals the unfamiliarity of what seems most familiar to Spenser’s character” (examples: borrow = pledge [33]; Guyon as a wrestler [52]). What with the murky interventions of E. K.’s glossing, I found the discussion speculative (106). Spenser is on somewhat safer ground in the Faerie Queene. Using French, he questions the derivation of true Courtesie from actual courts (46; Faerie Queene, 6.1.1). Charissa bidding of her beades (56) points to an “idealized form of Christian worship,” though one early reader smelled a rat: “Why beades, & not prayer?”Jonson, writing for the dual audiences of theater and print, likes etymology for “its capacity to show the endurance of his language and…to make his language endure” (186). His attitude is pragmatic. What a masque audience does not grasp, the reader of the ensuing print may do, thanks to “deferral.” Time, and print, help you think. In the king’s entertainment of 1604, the “Flamen” wore an “apex,” as Varro had explained. “By…directing his reader to Varro’s analysis of these terms, Jonson prompts consideration of the origins of priestly vestments, a hotly contested issue at a time when hopes were high among English recusants that the Scottish King’s marriage to a widely suspected Catholic might prompt the new monarch to display increased clemency towards their cause” (79). If so, November 5 dashed those hopes. This chapter endeared me to Jonson by dwelling on his hopes. In this time of mutual fears and coercion, Jonson’s coded word use may have caught coreligionists’ attention but not James’s (76).After Spenser’s secondhand Old English and Jonson’s firsthand Latin, Donne’s Hebrew is again secondhand. (Milton, last up, comes closest to “compleat” etymologist.) Donne preaches on Hebrew Chanach or catechism at St. Paul’s Cross on September 15, 1622, to a mixed audience, following the king’s Directions of the previous month. The location of each pulpit and auditory governs Donne’s etymologizing. To the Inns of Court he analyzes Nachal, inheritance; Elah, to swear; Tochen, to examine. To the “Lords” at Whitehall in 1617 he discusses change, kalaph: Rome has had to change, but what the English church needs is stability (122). So among biblical names for God he dwells on the encompassing Elohim rather than the narrower Jehovah, Adonai, and Tzebaoth (125). This sermon is most rewarding because it reckons with language change, the “imprecise equivalences between languages and the slippages in meaning that can…result” (127). It reminds me of “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins’s sense that the God of change is beyond change. Whereas I find Donne’s sermons embarrassing when conformist, etymology becomes one of their escapes into sublimity.Crawforth launches the chapter on Milton powerfully, thanks to his etymological punchline, “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large” (“On the New Forcers of Conscience” [1646]; 147). Speaking of punches, this author pulled none until silenced. And etymology was always a reliable weapon for him. Crawforth discerns a development in Milton from deriding his opponents’ “pedantick” practice to an idealism, based on an ideal state he finds in a word’s original meaning, but then after 1660 “word histories are the measure of our fallen state…how far we have deviated from an ideal beginning” (188). This account of Milton’s English prose contributes new evidence and insight into the ongoing debate about his social and religious ideas.The next phase of that discussion could examine more than Milton’s English works. He berates Salmasius’s account of Anglo-Saxon hundreda. He relies on etymology to reject in advance any charges of heresy against De doctrina. Among the rebuttals of the Trinity on grounds of logic or Scripture he declares that persona means, because it had meant, a “mask” in classical drama. But while these are further evidence for the worth of Crawforth’s approach, it arouses some misgivings: (1) The development she discerns does not need etymological evidence; (2) Milton resembles earlier poets in doing things with etymology that he objects to in others—this is endemic in applying etymology to controversial questions, not least biblical ones; and (3) For Milton, this may be a continuing, not a developing, trend.Nonetheless, Hannah Crawforth is to be congratulated on her method and insights. The book defamiliarizes a thought process too easily taken for granted. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 1August 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681209 Views: 248Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
• W2334677910 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2334677910 creator A5078194275 @default.
• W2334677910 date "2015-08-01" @default.
• W2334677910 modified "2023-09-25" @default.
• W2334677910 title "Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature. Hannah Crawforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+218." @default.
• W2334677910 doi "https://doi.org/10.1086/681209" @default.
• W2334677910 hasPublicationYear "2015" @default.
• W2334677910 type Work @default.
• W2334677910 sameAs 2334677910 @default.
• W2334677910 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W2334677910 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2334677910 hasAuthorship W2334677910A5078194275 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConcept C193427332 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConcept C74916050 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConceptScore W2334677910C124952713 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConceptScore W2334677910C142362112 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConceptScore W2334677910C193427332 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConceptScore W2334677910C74916050 @default.
• W2334677910 hasConceptScore W2334677910C95457728 @default.
• W2334677910 hasIssue "1" @default.
• W2334677910 hasLocation W23346779101 @default.
• W2334677910 hasOpenAccess W2334677910 @default.
• W2334677910 hasPrimaryLocation W23346779101 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W1974108337 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2042302482 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2054916079 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2083635752 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2512967596 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2899084033 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W2995900745 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W3212411255 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W4254056627 @default.
• W2334677910 hasRelatedWork W604342853 @default.
• W2334677910 hasVolume "113" @default.
• W2334677910 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2334677910 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2334677910 magId "2334677910" @default.
• W2334677910 workType "article" @default.