Terms and Definitions

Question 1

Renaissance

Answer 1

A pan-European movement unfolding (unevenly) across the continent. The rebirth of letters & arts as a result of the rediscovery of texts from ancient Greece & Rome.

Question 2

Humanism

Answer 2

An approach to learning & knowledge that was more worldly, secular, & anthropocentric in terms of its understanding of the universe. Focus on the perfection of this worldly life rather than the attainment of the next life.

Question 3

Pastoral

Answer 3

• Depictions of shepherds in the fields discussing love & poetry.
• Romanticizes the lives & innocence of country people.
• Conventions: shepherds & shepherdesses, sheep, a refined rustic dialect
• Idealization, prelapsarian/paradisal, ‘golden age,’ nostalgia, (anti) commerce, primitivism.
• Key narratives: unrequited love, the merits of country life, the corruption of urban life.

Question 4

“Rota Virgilii”

Answer 4

“Rota Virgilii” or Virgil’s Wheel: the “Renaissance ideal of patterning one’s life after Virgil’s literary triad”. Basically copying the same path Virgil took to being a successful poet.

Question 5

Court Culture

Answer 5

• Elaborate theatre & masque productions were prepared & staged for its members.
• Elaborate fashion was developed for & displayed by its members.
• The site of potential disappointment & treachery.
• The court thus not only provided the impetus for the production of poetry (i.e., to secure patronage), but it also affected the forms that it would take (sophisticated, complex, multiple in its meanings)

Question 6

The Sonnet

Answer 6

• The period’s penchant for elaborate, intricate designs & formal structure
• 14-line poems with complex rhyme schemes, a ‘movement’ that includes a ‘turn,’ & multiple meanings.
• A byproduct of both court culture & English conviction about an orderly cosmos.

Question 7

What does the attraction of the Pastoral and the heroic reflect about the period?

Answer 7

The attraction to these modes reflects a deeper sense of loss as older ways of life (agricultural, warrior) give way to a more modern, urban way of life (commercial, realpolitik, courtly).

Question 8

Which description below best describes the situation of the Reformation in England under Elizabeth’s rule.

Answer 8

The country as a whole is divided, but the Reformist cause is largely winning the day.

Question 9

The “rota Virgili is:

Answer 9

A sequence of genres a poet adopts, after the pattern of Virgil.

Question 10

What is the ultimate demand or argument made by Spenser’s “October”?

Answer 10

That a monarch who aspires to make England a world power needs to foster culture and the arts.

Question 11

The Reformation in England

Answer 11

Some longed for a return to Catholicism, & others who favoured reform debated the precise form & tenets that that reformed religion ought to take.

Question 12

What objections did the Protestants have regarding a number of key tenets & sacraments in the Catholic faith?

Answer 12

1. The doctrine of “transubstantiation”
2. The sacrament of “confession”
3. The concept of “purgatory” & any sacraments/practices (masses, indulgences) related to it.
4. The clergy’s exclusive access to & control over the word of God.

Question 13

Sola Scriptura

Answer 13

The direct word of God (the bible) is much more important over any clerical interpretation.
Protestants imagined “true” Christianity as an individual relationship between man & God that required no mediation.

Question 14

Sola Fide

Answer 14

Faith over good works.

Question 15

Calvinism or “Dissenters”

Answer 15

• Followers of John Calvin
• Doctrine of predestination, or the theory God has chosen who will be saved (the elect) & who will be damned (the reprobate) long ago (foreordained, pre-determined) (so-called “double predestination”)
• Both the faithful (‘elect’) and the damned (‘reprobates’) are pre-ordained by God

Question 16

Independents, Nonconformists, or Dissenters

Answer 16

While these groups had separate beliefs, all were Protestants for whom the English Reformation did not go far enough (i.e., they DISSENTed from those who originally PROTESTed).

Question 17

What did the Catholics belive?

Answer 17

• Salvation requires good works
• The word of God ought to be taught / mediated via established authority figures.

Question 18

What did the Protestants belive?

Answer 18

• All sacraments/concepts without biblical precedent (confession, purgatory, indulgences) should be abandoned (sola scriptura).
• Faith alone (sola fide) is the path to salvation.
• The Church has become too worldly.

Question 19

What did the Anglicans belive?

Answer 19

The faithful (‘elect’) are pre-ordained by God.

Question 20

What fundamental belief was Protestantism founded on?

Answer 20

All ideas about the Christian faith require a textual basis (the bible).

Question 21

What description below best captures the Church of England’s relationship with the Calvinist notion of “predestination”?

Answer 21

The Church half-heartedly embraced it.

Question 22

Metaphyical Poetry

Answer 22

The violent yoking together of seemingly unrelated ideas (via Samuel Johnson)—‘violent’ because the two images being brought together seem so very unrelated & distant to one another.

Question 23

Dramatic Monologue

Answer 23

The speaker is NOT necessarily a voice for the poet; usually, the relationship between the poet, the character, & the audience can be much more complicated.
The speaker is often involved in a moment of “soul bearing”; revealing something about him/herself, sometimes intentionally, sometimes (esp. in the poetry of Robert Browning) unintentionally.

Question 24

Soliloquy

Question 25

Divine Right

Question 26

Interregnum

Question 27

Heroic Couplets

Answer 27

• Lambic pentameter
• Rhyming AA, BB,

Question 28

Topographicl / Prospect Poetry

Answer 28

Poetry that surveys a particular local landscape, rendering it in metaphorical/analogous terms.

Question 29

Country House Poem

Answer 29

• Praises a particular country house / owner: An identity between the two
• House’s oneness with the place (landscape, tenants) reflects
• the owner’s & class’s ‘proper place’ in the social hierarchy
• (harmonious social order); physical & social “place” cohere
• Typically celebrates ‘the English way of life’

Question 30

What differentiates a dramatic monologue from a soliloquy?

Answer 30

Dramatic monologues are addresses to a listener.

Question 31

What is the ‘hallmark’ or ‘telltale’ feature of a work of metaphyical poetry?

Answer 31

It uses ‘conceits’ that violently yoke together seemingly unrelated ideas.

Question 32

Which sentence below best describes the function or purpose of the survey of the landscape/estate in the country house poem?

Answer 32

It allows the author to suggest the rightness of the lord’s privileged place in society and England’s social order.

Question 33

What sentence below best describes the commentary on class made by Jonson’s “To Penshurst”?

Answer 33

All is well, but an oppositional force is emerging.

Question 34

What feature of Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” most differentiates it from Jonson’s “To Penshurst”?

Answer 34

The desision to attributes the affirmation of order to Clifford.

Question 35

When Lanyer comments “Unconstant fortune , thou art most to blame, / Who casts us down into so low a frame, / Where our great friends we cannot daily see, / So great a difference is there in degree”, she is effectively saying:

Answer 35

England’s class structure keeps members of different classes separated.

Question 36

What is a Satire?

Answer 36

A literary mode in which human or individual weaknesses, vices, follies, etc. are censured through the use of ridicule, sarcasm, parody, etc.—ideally, with the intent of shaming the target into correction or improvement. While funny, its primary purpose is didactic—i.e., it is trying to teach us the “proper” way of thinking, behaving, or doing. Requires an implied counter-tradition: there is another set of values or norms the writer can assume the reader knows well & can call on to understand the contrast.
- Key conceit: “disinterestedness”—the target is not chosen out of spite but is rather because they are a symptom of a larger problem; the larger goal (supposedly) is reformation, an embrace of the implied, consensus-based counter-tradition

Question 37

Mock Heroic

Answer 37

A satirical poem that employs a lofty manner of writing & a serious tone characteristic of the heroic drama in order to treat a trivial subject in such a way as to make it ridiculous. The mock-heroic form mocks the subject of its poem; it works by making a trivial subject seem grand in order to point out how low, mean, or absurd it is .

Question 38

empiricism

Question 39

The Public Sphere

Question 40

Comedy

Answer 40

It dramatizes one of the quintessential dramas of human societies: the transition from generation/order/rule to another (Northrop Frye).
The young/new subvert, bypass, &/or defeat the old/previous; social displacement & change

Question 41

Hobbesian Philosophy

Question 42

Comedy of Manners