Writing Early Modern Loneliness

Hannah Yip, Thomas Clifton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031550515
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031550522
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This interdisciplinary collection of ten essays is the first to redefine historical conceptions of "loneliness" in the Western world by exploring its manifestation in early modern textual sources. Contrary to current scholarly consensus that loneliness in Britain was understood as an emotion from the late eighteenth century, only beginning to emerge in its literary form in the writings of the Romantic poets, the contributors in this volume argue that early modern people were capable of complex and conflicting feelings of social and emotional isolation which were expressed in a wide range of writings. Moreover, these products of loneliness continue to resonate poignantly with humanity today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Is “Early Modern Loneliness” an Anachronism?
• Anxia Bellerophontis: Bellerophon and Loneliness from Homer to Early Modernity
• “But she to be a Quene, and creuely handeled as was never sene”: Perspectives on Anne Boleyn’s Loneliness in the Tower of London
• “A thowsond mylys a sonder”: Catholic Exiles from Tudor England and the Ambiguities of Loneliness
• “Bear Humanly the Human Lot”: Jan Kochanowski and Seeking Catharsis Alone in Early Modern Poland
• “It is not good that the man should be alone”: Marriage, Loneliness, and the Clergy in Early Modern England
• The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Believer: Isolation in Seventeenth-Century Religious Poetry in English
• A “Lasting Moniment” to Loneliness: Involuntary Retirement and Survival Through the Psalm Translations of Sir Thomas Fairfax
• “Another time, in a Lowering and sad Evening, being alone in the field”: Revising Loneliness in the Meditative Writing of Thomas Traherne and Elizabeth Delaval
• William Penn’s Some Fruits of Solitude: Public Disgrace and Private Consolation
• The Loneliness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Past and Present
• Afterword
• Back Matter