An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort at intellectual mediation in the deep religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. On one side was the antinomian assertion of extreme Calvinists that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace and thereby free from ordinary moral obligations. Opposite to that was the Arminian rejection of predestination and assertion that Christ died for all, not just for the elect. Faced with the violence of these disputes, Nathaniel Culverwell attempted a moderate defense of reason and natural law, arguing, in the words of Robert Greene, that “reason and faith are distinct lights, yet they are not opposed; they are complementary and harmonious. Reason is the image of God in man, and to deny right reason is to deny our relation to God.” Culverwell presented this understanding of the role of reason by expounding upon Proverbs 20:27, “The understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord.” This was a favorite text among the Cambridge Platonists (Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith, and More), to whom Culverwell was close. He had obviously absorbed much also from Bacon, Grotius, and Selden. However, the most profound influence on him was that of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez’s De Legibus, ac Deo Legislatore (1612), which is also part of this series. An Elegant and Learned Discourse was delivered as a series of sermon-like lectures at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1645/46 and published posthumously in 1652. Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651) was a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Robert A. Greene is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Hugh MacCallum was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto. Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History and Director of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1654 Edition.

Transparency and Dissimulation analyses the configurations of ancient neoplatonism in early modern English texts. In looking closely at poems and prose writings by authors as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Browne and, last not least, Aphra Behn, this study attempts to map the outlines of a neoplatonic aesthetics in literary practice as well as to chart its transformative potential in the shifting contexts of cultural turbulency and denominational conflict in 16th- and 17th-century England. As part of a “new”, contextually aware, aesthetics, it seeks to determine some of the functions neoplatonic structures – such as forms of recursivity or certain modes of apophatic speech – are capable of fulfilling in combination and interaction with other, heterogeneous or even ideologically incompatible elements. What emerges is a surprisingly versatile poetics of excess and enigma, with strong Plotinian and Erigenist accents. This appears to need the traditional ingredients of petrarchism or courtliness only as material for the formation of new and dynamic wholes, revealing its radical metaphysical potential above all in the way it helps to resist the easy answers – in religion, science, or the fashions of libertine love.

'Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi' examines John Selden and his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets