Originally published in 1967, this book discusses some key writers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Castiglione, Bacon and Hobbes and compares their work by relating it that of others in England and elsewhere. Chapters on Bacon contain references to Galileo and Descartes; the chapter on Castiglione also touches on Montaigne. The book also contrasts various currents of thought in the Renaissance with their medieval counterparts or forerunners. The volume isolates the great themes, or revolutionary shifts in as they manifest themselves in the work of important writers and thinkers.

First published in 1964, Renaissance & Seventeenth - Century Studies contains essays which fall into two groups. The first four are concerned with problems of metaphor and style and treat two important eras in literary history when these problems underwent critical re-examination. St. Augustine marks the classical attempt to take account of "biblical poetics" while the two essays on the theory of the "metaphysical" style treat the attempt of seventeenth century critics to comprehend, at the theoretical level, the expansion of metaphysical possibilities that marked the "metaphysical" movement. The second group of essays are, in general, concerned with Machiavelli and Machiavellism and Andrew Marvell. However, they are again essentially concerned with the way in which crucial metaphors and idea-images serve as principles for organising experience both in Machiavelli's own writings and in that of work of Marvell which reflects his influence. The final essay "Cromwell as Davidic King", weaves together Machiavellian and Augustinian strands as they are manifested in the works of a poet of wit, the "various light" of whose mind responded harmoniously to the different currents of thought and taste these essays discuss. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literature, literary history, political philosophy, and philosophy in general.

First published in 1962, Reason and Imagination presents collection of fourteen essays dedicated to Marjorie Hope Nicholson and is divided equally between works of her colleagues and of her former students. It contains themes like noble numbers and poetry of devotion, Cromwell as Davidic King, the isolation of the renaissances hero, Milton's dialogue on Astronomy, music, mirth and galenic traditions in England, the Augustan conception of history, Locke and Sterne, and literary criticism and artistic interpretation, to weave a narrative of the history of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literary history, philosophy, comparative literature, and English literature in general.

Originally published in 1967, this book discusses some key writers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Castiglione, Bacon and Hobbes and compares their work by relating it that of others in England and elsewhere. Chapters on Bacon contain references to Galileo and Descartes; the chapter on Castiglione also touches on Montaigne. The book also contrasts various currents of thought in the Renaissance with their medieval counterparts or forerunners. The volume isolates the great themes, or revolutionary shifts in as they manifest themselves in the work of important writers and thinkers.