Search results for ""Author Alasdair A. MacDonald""

First full study and edition of the works of George Lauder, "the poet whom Scotland forgot". The Scottish poet George Lauder began as a "university wit", by imitating anti-papal satires popular in the Italian Renaissance. He set off for London as a young man, looking for patronage, but instead became an officer in the army, seeing service in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Denmark and Sweden -- an experience which provides the backdrop to the poetry of his mature years. At the Restoration he wrote a lengthy poem of advice to Charles II, and his final masterwork was a poetic conflation of the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Lauder was influenced by Ben Jonson, William Drummond, and by the Metaphysical and the Caroline styles. His personal library testifies to his wide range of interests, and to his acquaintance with European literature in neo-Latin and other languages. This volume traces Lauder's career, collects all his surviving verse (presented with full notes and commentary), and examines his interactions with certain of the greatest intellectuals of the Dutch Golden Age. Lauder was a British patriot and a loyal supporter of the House of Orange; above all, however, he is the author of a unique corpus of highly accomplished poetry. ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Groningen, Netherlands.

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New edition of a collection of songs and ballads from sixteenth-century Scotland, shedding important new light on the English and Scottish Reformation. The Gude and Godlie Ballatis is a collection of religious lyrics from the early years of the Scottish Reformation. It was a highly popular, if controversial, volume, was often reprinted, and is considered one of the most important literary works of vernacular Scots from the period. It contains translations of a number of Psalms, but most of the contents consist of shorter songs and ballads, many of which have been adapted from a secular to a spiritual use. The previous edition of the collection dates from 1897. The new edition not only revises the information given there, but presents the text of the earliest print (1565), which was unknown to the previous editor. The textual development of the collection through the various printings is studied, and is related to the changing historical, political, literary, cultural and theological contexts of Reformation Scotland. The editor addresses questions of authorship, transmission, source material, and the use and significance of these lyrics. Drawing on recent work in book history and English psalmody, as well as a deep knowledge of Older Scots lyric, he demonstrates the close connections between the collection and Continental hymnody, as well as interactions with English and Scots lyric, both sacred and profane. Alasdair A. MacDonald is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literatureof the Middle Ages, University of Groningen.

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Study and translation of the religious and philosophical work by this Scottish-born, France-based Renaissance humanist and educator.The Commentatio quaedam theologica of Florentius Volusenus (c.1504-c.1557) is a religious and philosophical work of the Renaissance, cast in the form of rhetorical aphorisms. Volusenus was an admirer of Erasmus, tutored the son of Cardinal Wolsey, and was close to the circles around Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. In Paris he received patronage from prominent humanist ecclesiastics, as also from bishop Jacopo Sadoleto at Carpentras. A colleague at Lyon of the poet Barthélemy Aneau, he taught Sebastian Castellio, who later broke with Calvin. Volusenus, an eirenic Catholic, favoured Church reform before the Reformation became irreversible.

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