Search results for ""Author Paul Strohm""

Where does our conscience come from? How reliable is it? In the West conscience has been relied upon for two thousand years as a judgement that distinguishes right from wrong. It has effortlessly moved through every period division and timeline between the ancient, medieval, and modern. The Romans identified it, the early Christians appropriated it, and Reformation Protestants and loyal Catholics relied upon its advice and admonition. Today it is embraced with equal conviction by non-religious and religious alike. Considering its deep historical roots and exploring what it has meant to successive generations, Paul Strohm highlights why this particularly European concept deserves its reputation as 'one of the prouder Western contributions to human rights and human dignity throughout the world.' Using examples from popular culture including the Disney classic Pinocchio, as well as examples from contemporary politics, he explores the work of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Aquinas, to show how and why conscience remains a motivating and important principle in the contemporary world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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After the dethronement and subsequent murder of Richard II, the usurping Lancastrian dynasty faced an exceptional challenge. Interrupting a long period of Plantagenet rule, Henry IV and Henry V needed not only to establish physical possession of the English throne but to occupy it symbolically as well. In this boldly revisionary book, Paul Strohm provides a new account of the Lancastrian revolution and its aftermath. Integrating techniques of literary and historical analysis, he reveals the Lancastrian monarchs as masters of outward display, persuasively "performing" their kingship through a variety of novel ceremonies in a quest for legitimacy. He also describes far-reaching Lancastrian experiments in domination, including the proscription of prophecy; the enlistment of poetry as court propaganda; the extensive use of spies and informers; and, most ambitiously, the redefinition of treason to cover not only overt deeds but words and thoughts as well. Strohm's account of the Lancastrian quest for legitimacy and the uses of symbolic power illuminates—indeed, recasts—our understanding of a period of unprecedented political upheaval.

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In this book Paul Strohm shifts his recognized talent for textual and cultural analysis to the later fifteenth century, arguing that England experienced its own "pre-Machiavellian" moment between 1450 and 1485. These turbulent decades encouraged new pragmatic discussions of political policies of a sort not previously seen and not to be seen again until the middle of the sixteenth century. Strohm contends that England had no need to await the writings of Machiavelli to find its voice in matters of practical statecraft and political calculation. In support of this thesis, he analyzes a range of mainly vernacular fifteenth-century English political texts along with several contemporary writings from Burgundy, France, and Italy. The writers of these texts are unsentimental, shrewdly informed, and keenly concerned with political practice in the world. Intricately connected with this new discussion of worldly politics is a revised, and more hopeful, view of the individual’s relation to Fortune and her operations. Emergent in the English fifteenth century is the possibility that the prudent prince can effectively "Fortune-proof" himself by the exercise of foresight and the qualities of vertue—a trait remarkably anticipatory of its Italian and Machiavellian counterpart, virtú. This view is introduced to England by the poet John Lydgate and flourishes in the second half of the fifteenth century. In addition to Lydgate, Strohm looks at the imaginative accomplishments of other undercredited writers such as Fortescue, Pecock, Whethamstede, Warkworth, and the unnamed authors of Somnium Vigilantis, Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, and the Great Chronicle of London. He also offers an appreciation of the collective linguistic and symbolic endeavors of those in the fifteenth-century public sphere. This detailed and rich study, which is based on the 2003 Conway Lectures Strohm delivered at the University of Notre Dame, contributes to the fields of medieval and early modern studies, medieval literary criticism, and political philosophy.

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Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to ‘atoms’ or ‘droplets’ and extending to the silent spaces of eternity. They might measure time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars or the progress of the seasons, even as the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock was making time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.

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