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Three Major Issues
The first issue: "Gender, Family, Household:
Seventeenth-Century Norms and Controversies" provides important
religious, legal, and domestic advice texts through which to explore
cultural assumptions about gender roles and the patriarchal family. It
also invites attention to how those assumptions are modified or
challenged in the practices of actual families and households; in
tracts on transgressive subjects (cross-dressing, women speaking in
church, divorce); in women's texts asserting women's worth, talents,
and rights; and especially in the upheavals of the English Revolution
"Paradise Lost in Context,"
the second topic for this period,
surrounds that radically revisionist epic with texts that invite
readers to examine how it engages with the interpretative traditions
surrounding the Genesis story, how it uses classical myth, how it
challenges orthodox notions of Edenic innocence, and how it is
positioned within but also against the epic tradition from Homer to
Virgil to Du Bartas.
The third topic,
"Civil Wars of Ideas: Seventeenth-Century Politics, Religion, and
Culture," provides an opportunity to explore, through political and
polemical treatises and striking images, some of the issues and
conflicts that led to civil war and the overthrow of monarchical
government (1642-60). These include royal absolutism vs. parliamentary
or popular sovereignty, monarchy vs. republicanism, Puritanism vs.
Anglicanism, church ritual and ornament vs. iconoclasm, toleration vs.
religious uniformity, and controversies over court masques and Sunday
sports. The climax to all this was the highly dramatic trial and
execution of King Charles I (January 1649), a cataclysmic event that
sent shock waves through courts, hierarchical institutions, and
traditionalists everywhere.
Text Source: https://search.liu.se/en/
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