Literature and Morality

Question 1

Elizabeth Spiller

Answer 1

Suggests that Renaissance thinkers saw reading as a form of sight - “looking, perceiving, idenitfying” - through humoral theory, what was read thus came to have an embodied effect on physical self
Reading as an “embodied act”, a “material practice” directly affecting people’s bodies

Question 2

What does Spenser aspire towards in The Fairie Queene?

Answer 2

‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’

Question 3

How does George Puttenham defend poetry in The Art of English Poesie?

Answer 3

‘poesie was th’original cause and occasion of their first assemblies’ ; creaing a ‘more civil and orderly life’, ‘ functions to ‘redress and edify’ human nature

Question 4

What does Francis Bacon say is the ;duty of rhetoric’ in The Advancement of Learning?

Answer 4

‘The ‘duty of rhetoric is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will’’