Nicholas Mcdowell
Biographic Data
| ID | 3766875 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas Mcdowell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdowell |
| SIGNATURE | MCDOWELL N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8488-8665 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 37 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1660 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, and virtue politics
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714 is the most wide-ranging overview available of prose writing in English during one of the most tumultuous periods in British and Irish history. Stretching from the outbreak of the English Civil War to the death of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, the volume is unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of an age in which prose moved from the margins of cultural life in Britain to its centre. T…
Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714
Reading Milton reading Shakespeare politically
The question of how Milton read Shakespeare has been put in a new light by the astonishing identification in 2019 of Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia First Folio contains over 600 instances of lines and passages that have been scored or bracketed and over 120 instances of textual emendation, convincingly ascribed to Milton’s hand, most probably between the late 1620s and the early …
Poet of Revolution
The Double Personality of Lucianic Satire from Dryden to Fielding
This chapter considers the importance of Lucianic satire as a model for Dryden, Swift, Fielding, and other writers between 1650 and 1760 in the light of what has been called Lucian’s ‘double personality’ in early modern Europe: for some he was an erudite, witty, and moral satirist of hypocrisy; for others, a dangerously irreligious scoffer and sceptic who brought Christian morality into doubt. By the later seventeenth century, he was more usually…
Civil wars of words
The title of the final chapter of David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), ‘Civil Wars of Words’, encapsulates both a fundamental argument of the book and a key aspect of its interpretative methodology. In this review essay, I consider the importance of linguistic and literary evidence to Armitage’s method of intellectual history in his global study of civil wars, and suggest how this method can offer a foundation for a new cultura…
Towards redefinition of Cavalier poetics
The problem with the term “Cavalier Poets”, as Peter Davidson has pointed out, is that it “identifies a school by allegiance and period, rather than by a distinguishing literary feature”. But if we were to redefine the Cavalier poets in terms of “a distinguishing literary feature”, what exactly would that feature be? Understanding the Cavalier poets in terms of their interest in contemporary continental poetry, and its translation and imitation i…
A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King Cromwell's Court
The proposals for an artificial, rational language of Thomas Urquhart, laird of Cromarty, are usually seen as an eccentric, peripheral contribution to the debates about language planning of the mid seventeenth century. Yet, as this article shows, Urquhart seems to have composed his language proposals in The Jewel (1652) in direct response to the efforts of Samuel Hartlib and his intellectual network of associates to advance learning at the moment…
Milton’s Euripides and the superior rationality of the heathen
If arguments have always been made either that Milton maintains the primacy of the Bible over classical literature, or that he often presents classical sentiments as congruent with the biblical, one claim that has rarely been made is that Milton is willing to assert the truth of classical literature over that of the Bible. This article argues that there are moments in the canon that show him capable of doing precisely this, with particular refere…
Wit, Conversation, and Literary Transmission in Mid-Seventeenth-Century France and England
References to Rabelais in Andrew Marvell’s prose satires against religious intolerance, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73), offer insights into the Restoration reception of Rabelaisian satire in the universities and the coffeehouses as a specifically anticlerical form of wit. But these references are either misattributed or incorrect, suggesting that Marvell may never actually have read Gargantua and Pantagruel, but rather picked up Rabelaisian …
The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 6: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings
No More Heroes Anymore? The Latest Life of John Milton
The Oxford Handbook of Milton
Milton's Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare
How Laudian Was the Young Milton?
Research Article| January 01 2011 How Laudian Was the Young Milton? Nicholas McDowell Nicholas McDowell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Milton Studies (2011) 52: 3–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/26395940 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nicholas McDowell; How Laudian Was the Young Milton?. Milton Studies 1 January 2011; 52 3–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26395940 Download citation…
Lycidas’ and the Influence of Anxiety
From Belfast to Baghdad
Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’
In this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of the young gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid‐1640s, in the aftermath of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the culture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the St…
Dead Souls and Modern Minds? Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination, from Marlowe to Milton
Mortalism, the doctrine that the soul sleeps or dies with the death of the body to be reawakened or resurrected at the Last Judgment, was adopted by Luther but became a significant feature of the continental “radical Reformation” rather than of the Calvinist theology that shaped later-sixteenth-century English Protestantism. It was amid the intellectual turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century that mortalist ideas first became common currency in…
The Oxford handbook of Milton
A comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the first decade of the 21st century.
Introduction
This introductory chapter emphasizes how Andrew Marvell the lyric poet has been divided in scholarship from Andrew Marvell the political poet. One of the goals of the book is to recover a social context for the early Marvell that can account for both the origins and audience of the lyric verse and the early political poems. This introduction surveys critical representations of Marvell as a solitary and private poet and juxtaposes these with evide…
Social Contexts of Marvell's Lyric Verse, 1646–1648
This chapter discusses the talented circle of poets who gathered under the patronage of the wealthy royalist gentleman Thomas Stanley in the aftermath of the first civil war. Returning from a four-year grand tour Stanley based himself in the Inns of Court in London and turned his rooms in the Middle Temple into a meeting place for poets such as Richard Lovelace, John Hall, James Shirley and Edward Sherburne. The circle was particularly interested…
Richard Lovelace and the End of Court Culture, 1647–1649
Richard Lovelace is the best-known ‘Cavalier’ poet. He was a relative and close friend of Thomas Stanley; he was friends with both John Hall and Marvell. This chapter offers a revisionist interpretation of several of his most acclaimed lyric poems, including ‘The Grasshopper’, by placing them in the context of royalist disillusionment in the aftermath of the king's defeat but also of the cultural activities of the Stanley circle. These readings o…
Conclusion
The concluding chapter focuses on Marvell's satire ‘Tom May's Death’, the allegiance which has long puzzled scholars given its apparently royalist sentiment but date of composition after the ‘Horatian Ode’. It is argued that the poem is written in the cause of wit, rather than royalism or republicanism, and so appropriate for an audience composed of former members of the Stanley circle. May's betrayal is of the muses; Marvell fears the same charg…
Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars
This is an exploration of the things which united, rather than divided, poets during the English Civil Wars, focusing less on conflicts between 'Cavaliers' and 'Roundheads' than on the friendships and shared literary enthusiasms of men of various political allegiance
Towards redefinition of Cavalier poetics
The problem with the term “Cavalier Poets”, as Peter Davidson has pointed out, is that it “identifies a school by allegiance and period, rather than by a distinguishing literary feature”. But if we were to redefine the Cavalier poets in terms of “a distinguishing literary feature”, what exactly would that feature be? Understanding the Cavalier poets in terms of their interest in contemporary continental poetry, and its translation and imitation i…
A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King Cromwell's Court
The proposals for an artificial, rational language of Thomas Urquhart, laird of Cromarty, are usually seen as an eccentric, peripheral contribution to the debates about language planning of the mid seventeenth century. Yet, as this article shows, Urquhart seems to have composed his language proposals in The Jewel (1652) in direct response to the efforts of Samuel Hartlib and his intellectual network of associates to advance learning at the moment…
Milton’s Euripides and the superior rationality of the heathen
If arguments have always been made either that Milton maintains the primacy of the Bible over classical literature, or that he often presents classical sentiments as congruent with the biblical, one claim that has rarely been made is that Milton is willing to assert the truth of classical literature over that of the Bible. This article argues that there are moments in the canon that show him capable of doing precisely this, with particular refere…
Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’
In this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of the young gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid‐1640s, in the aftermath of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the culture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the St…
Dead Souls and Modern Minds? Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination, from Marlowe to Milton
Mortalism, the doctrine that the soul sleeps or dies with the death of the body to be reawakened or resurrected at the Last Judgment, was adopted by Luther but became a significant feature of the continental “radical Reformation” rather than of the Calvinist theology that shaped later-sixteenth-century English Protestantism. It was amid the intellectual turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century that mortalist ideas first became common currency in…
The stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England
John Traske was publicly tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment in London in June 1618 for preaching that Jewish ceremonial laws continued to apply to Christians. Traske's punishment needs to be placed in the context of the government's campaign to discredit Puritan opposition to the Book of Sports, one of the most controversial policies of James's reign. The trial facilitated the polemical identification of Puritan sabbatarianism with the O…
Ideas of Creation in the Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost
Historians have been divided about the origins of Leveller theories concerning natural rights, equality, and democracy. This article gives an account of the monistic natural philosophy outlined by Richard Overton in his pre-Leveller work Mans Mortalitie (1643/44) and demonstrates how his heretical conception of creation provided a metaphysical foundation for his political ideas about the liberty of the subject. Comparisons and contrasts are made …
A Ranter Reconsidered
(1997). A RANTER RECONSIDERED: ABIEZER COPPE AND CIVIL WAR STEREOTYPES. The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 173-205
Brief notes upon a later sermon
A Ranter Reconsidered
(1997). A RANTER RECONSIDERED: ABIEZER COPPE AND CIVIL WAR STEREOTYPES. The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 173-205
Epilogue
The English Radical Imagination
219 pages ; 23 cm
Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas
IThe Presbyterian cleric Thomas Edwards has been awarded the title of 'first discoverer of the Levellers'. The 'prime targets' of the third part of Edwards's voluminous heresiography Gangraena (three parts, 1646) were 'the men who were later to be recognized as the leaders of the Leveller party' - John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton - and his summary of their constitutional radicalism anticipates fairly accurately the contents of th…
Levelling language
Humanism and Heresy in Milton's England
Over the last twenty years radical writing during the English Revolution has become established as a legitimate category of early modern literary achievement. However, radicalism and its literature has almost exclusively been associated with the experience of the culturally, as well as politically and socially, disenfranchised. In Milton and the English Revolution (1977) Christopher Hill offered this ‘popular heretical culture’ as a new context f…
The stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England
John Traske was publicly tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment in London in June 1618 for preaching that Jewish ceremonial laws continued to apply to Christians. Traske's punishment needs to be placed in the context of the government's campaign to discredit Puritan opposition to the Book of Sports, one of the most controversial policies of James's reign. The trial facilitated the polemical identification of Puritan sabbatarianism with the O…
Ideas of Creation in the Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost
Historians have been divided about the origins of Leveller theories concerning natural rights, equality, and democracy. This article gives an account of the monistic natural philosophy outlined by Richard Overton in his pre-Leveller work Mans Mortalitie (1643/44) and demonstrates how his heretical conception of creation provided a metaphysical foundation for his political ideas about the liberty of the subject. Comparisons and contrasts are made …
Writing the Literary and Cultural History of Radicalism in the English Revolution
Literary analysis of the rhetorical techniques and resources of some of the key texts produced by mid-seventeenth-century radicals reveals them to be sophisticated readers and writers who were not excluded from mainstream intellectual culture but rather appropriated aspects of that culture in a moment of historical crisis to develop languages of subversion, opposition and reform
Early modern stereotypes and the rise of English
Stereotyping is a mode of stigmatisation and polarisation, and so we tend to think of the stereotype as a deadening force which closes down conversation. But we need to appreciate further the extent to which the transmission of stereotypes can facilitate and shape creative cultural response, even if that response is designed to simplify and satirise in the service of an ideological imperative. The stereotype of the Puritan as ignoramus in Ben Jon…
Introduction
This introductory chapter emphasizes how Andrew Marvell the lyric poet has been divided in scholarship from Andrew Marvell the political poet. One of the goals of the book is to recover a social context for the early Marvell that can account for both the origins and audience of the lyric verse and the early political poems. This introduction surveys critical representations of Marvell as a solitary and private poet and juxtaposes these with evide…
Social Contexts of Marvell's Lyric Verse, 1646–1648
This chapter discusses the talented circle of poets who gathered under the patronage of the wealthy royalist gentleman Thomas Stanley in the aftermath of the first civil war. Returning from a four-year grand tour Stanley based himself in the Inns of Court in London and turned his rooms in the Middle Temple into a meeting place for poets such as Richard Lovelace, John Hall, James Shirley and Edward Sherburne. The circle was particularly interested…
Richard Lovelace and the End of Court Culture, 1647–1649
Richard Lovelace is the best-known ‘Cavalier’ poet. He was a relative and close friend of Thomas Stanley; he was friends with both John Hall and Marvell. This chapter offers a revisionist interpretation of several of his most acclaimed lyric poems, including ‘The Grasshopper’, by placing them in the context of royalist disillusionment in the aftermath of the king's defeat but also of the cultural activities of the Stanley circle. These readings o…
Conclusion
The concluding chapter focuses on Marvell's satire ‘Tom May's Death’, the allegiance which has long puzzled scholars given its apparently royalist sentiment but date of composition after the ‘Horatian Ode’. It is argued that the poem is written in the cause of wit, rather than royalism or republicanism, and so appropriate for an audience composed of former members of the Stanley circle. May's betrayal is of the muses; Marvell fears the same charg…
Marvell and the End of Court Culture, 1648–1649
Allegiance, Patronage, and the Reception of Marvell's Verse, 1649–1650
This chapter begins with the fortunes of the Stanley circle in the aftermath of regicide by exploring their involvement in a volume of elegies for Henry, Lord Hastings, which is also an indirect lament for the death of the king. Hall and Marvell both contribute elegies, even though Hall was by now a paid propagandist for the Commonwealth government. The rest of the chapter addresses the ‘Horatian Ode’ and relates it to the new patronage environme…
Milton, John Hall, and Cultural Communities in Post‐War London, 1646–1647
This chapter focuses initially on John Hall of Durham, who had been under Stanley's patronage since 1642 and was a key member of his London literary group. Hall was also an avid reader of Milton's prose and an associate of the educational reformer and intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, who regarded the dissolution of the court as an opportunity to reform learning in England. The first section of the chapter examines Hall's correspondence with Hartlib …
Last Witnesses
Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars
This is an exploration of the things which united, rather than divided, poets during the English Civil Wars, focusing less on conflicts between 'Cavaliers' and 'Roundheads' than on the friendships and shared literary enthusiasms of men of various political allegiance
The Oxford handbook of Milton
A comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the first decade of the 21st century.
From Belfast to Baghdad
Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’
In this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of the young gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid‐1640s, in the aftermath of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the culture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the St…
Dead Souls and Modern Minds? Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination, from Marlowe to Milton
Mortalism, the doctrine that the soul sleeps or dies with the death of the body to be reawakened or resurrected at the Last Judgment, was adopted by Luther but became a significant feature of the continental “radical Reformation” rather than of the Calvinist theology that shaped later-sixteenth-century English Protestantism. It was amid the intellectual turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century that mortalist ideas first became common currency in…
The Oxford Handbook of Milton
Art (28 works) · History (27 works) · Literature (24 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity (10 works)