Nature and Law in Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Cavendish

本项目探讨早期现代英国文学中自然与法律关系的谈判。特别是，它考察了自然作为司法和政治权威来源的作用：采用了什么策略来维护和实施这种权威主张；他们产生了什么问题？对自然的提及被用来使一系列的法律和政治立场合法化。17世纪英格兰的主要政治冲突导致了1642年的内战和1649年的君主制清算，在此期间，保皇党和国会派都援引了不可改变的自然法则来为他们的军事政策辩护。“自然”一词的多义词歧义，以及学术的自然法和更世俗的自然法概念之间日益激烈的竞争，助长了法律立场的这种分裂性多样化。在这种历史背景下，所有试图将基督教的上帝和他的力量置于创造的自然秩序之中的尝试都具有显著的政治意义。自然与法律关系的文学谈判反映了这个时代的主要政治冲突。该项目利用这些资源，以重建和重新评估17世纪漫长的关键政治和认知转变。在这样做的过程中，它追溯了内战和空位（1642-60）的划时代裂痕所产生的连续性和不连续性。在莎士比亚和弥尔顿的作品中，连续性和非连续性的动态表现尤为强烈，他们的虚构世界是该项目批判性研究的中心。在当前阶段，悉尼的阿卡迪亚已成为进一步关注的焦点；在计划的第二阶段，将研究玛格丽特·卡文迪什的《燃烧的世界》和作者的其他作品。1580年代，西德尼在田园阿卡迪亚的典范背景下，探讨了伊丽莎白统治的规范理想和政治焦虑；在17世纪50年代和60年代，卡文迪什试图在革命的创伤中断之后，在乌托邦的另一个世界恢复保皇派的自然秩序。在卡文迪什的作品中，一种新的，非正统的自然哲学与“自然”情感规则的规范力量结合在一起，这些规范力量被奉为圣典，但同时也被西德尼和莎士比亚深深质疑。通过研究自然在早期现代英国文学的一些关键文本中的政治角色，该项目阐明了复杂的话语潮流和逆流，对政治和知识权威的竞争主张，这些主张是伊丽莎白一世统治和斯图尔特复辟之间的世纪的特征。包括“新哲学”和传统的知识和信仰体系，该项目探索的转变超越了任何统一的现代化叙事，并一再与之背道而驰。

This project explores negotiations of the relationship between nature and law in early modern English literature. In particular, it examines the role of nature as a source of juridical and political authority: what strategies were employed to assert and stage this authority claim; what problems did they produce? References to nature were used to legitimate a whole spectrum of legal and political positions. During England's central political conflict of the 17th century which led to the Civil War in 1642 and to the liquidation of the monarchy in 1649, both Royalists and Parliamentarians invoked nature's unalterable laws in order to justify their militant policies. Such divisive diversification of legal positions was aided by the polysemic ambiguities of the term 'nature' as well as by increasing competition between the scholastic lex naturalis and more secular conceptions of natural law. In this historical context, all attempts of locating the God of Christianity and His power within the natural order of Creation assumed an eminently political significance.Literary negotiations of the relationship between nature and law reflect key political conflicts of the age. The project engages with such sources in order to reconstruct and revaluate pivotal political and epistemic transformations of the long 17th century. In doing so, it traces both the continuities and discontinuities engendered by the epochal rift of the Civil War and the Interregnum (1642-60). The dynamics of continuity and discontinuity register with particular intensity in Shakespeare and Milton, whose fictional worlds are at the centre of the project's critical investigations. In the current phase, Sidney's Arcadia has been a further focus of interest; in the projected second phase of the project, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World and other writings by this author will be studied. Sidney, in the 1580s, explores the normative ideals and political anxieties of Elizabethan rule against the exemplary backdrop of pastoral Arcadia; Cavendish, in the 1650s and '60s, seeks to restore a Royalist order of nature in a utopian otherworld, following the traumatic hiatus of the Revolution. In Cavendish's writings a new, heterodox philosophy of nature coalesces with those normative powers of 'natural' affective rule which were canonized, but at the same time already profoundly problematized, by Sidney and Shakespeare. By studying the political role of nature in some of the key texts of early modern English literature, the project illuminates the complex discursive currents and counter-currents, the competing claims to political and epistemic authority that characterize the century between the reign of Elizabeth I and the Stuart Restoration. Encompassing both the 'new philosophy' and traditional systems of knowledge and belief, the transformations which the project explores transcend, and repeatedly run counter to, any unified narrative of modernization.