Learning to laugh: Children and being human in early modern thought

Textual Practice

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 277-294

  Fudge, Erica ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Chlidren; Dualism; Education; Human; Laughter; Reformed Theology

Indexed keywords

EID: 66049105670     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094845     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. See e.g. Patrick Collinson, 'The Protestant family', in his Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religion and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 60-93
2. Ian Green, ' ''For children in yeeres and children in understanding'': the emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37:3 (1986), pp. 397-425
3. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York: New American Library, 1979)
4. Christopher Hill, 'The spiritualization of the household', in his Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964, reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 429-66
5. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and CulturalDespair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978)
6. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
7. Robert V. Schnucker, 'Puritan attitudes towards childhood discipline, 1560-1634', in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 108-21
8. C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992)
9. Keith Thomas, 'Age and authority in early modern England', Proceedings of the British Academy 62, (1976), pp. 205-48
10. Thomas, 'Children in early modern England', in Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 45-77
11. Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 53
12. Daniel Widdowes, Naturall Philosophy, 2nd edn (London, 1631), p. 64
13. Widdowes, Naturall Philosophy, pp. 51-2
14. Th. W. [Thomas Wright], The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), p. 312
15. [Wright], Passions, p. 12
16. J.A. Sharpe, 'Disruption in the well-ordered household: age, authority, and possessed young people', inThe Experience of Authority in EarlyModern England, ed. PaulGriffiths, Adam Fox and SteveHindle (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1996), p. 188
17. Aristotle, De partibus animalium, Book III, ch. 10
18. See Helen Adolf, 'On Medieval laughter', Speculum, 22 (1947), p. 252
19. M.A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 1-3
20. M.A. Screech and Ruth Calder, 'Some Renaissance attitudes to laughter', in Humanism in France at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1970), p. 219
21. Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Part of De Anima et Vita, trans
22. Carlos G. Noreña (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 59
23. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 155
24. Screech, Laughter, p. 13
25. See Katherine Park, 'The organic soul', in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 464-84
26. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter (1579), trans. Gregory David De Rocher (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980), pp. 17 and 28
27. Joubert, Treatise, pp. 46 and 47
28. Cited in Screech, Laughter, p. 216
29. See Plato, Phaedrus, 246A-247C and 253D-254E
30. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1624), p. 31
31. Quentin Skinner, 'Why laughing mattered in the Renaissance: the second Henry Tudor Memorial Lecture', History of Political Thought, 22:3 (2001), pp. 418-47
32. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, cited in Skinner, 'Why laughing mattered', p. 428
33. Plato, Philebus, 50A-B, trans
34. Harold N. Fowler (Loeb Classical Library) (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 339
35. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, cited in Skinner, 'Why laughing mattered', p. 423
36. On Hobbes see R.E. Ewin, 'Hobbes on laughter', The Philosophical Quarterly, 51:202 (2001), pp. 29-40
37. Richard Greenham, 'Of joy and sorrow', in TheWorkes (London, 1601), p. 350
38. Plato's lack of laughter is according to Diogenes Laertius, cited in Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, 'Gracious laughter: Marsilio Ficino's anthropology', Renaissance Quarterly, 52:3 (1999), p. 717
39. J.Y.T. Greig, The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923), p. 25
40. Laurel L. Hendrix, ' ''Mother of laughter, and welspring of blisse'': Spenser's Venus and the poetics of mirth', ELR, 23 (1993), p. 119
41. Writing of Columbus' wondering, Stephen Greenblatt says, 'European culture experienced something like the ''startle reflex'' one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole body momentarily convulsed.' Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 14
42. Albertus Magnus, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, cited in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 81
43. Derrida, 'The animal that therefore I am', p. 373
44. Burton, Anatomy, p. 1
45. [ThomasMorton], A Treatise of the threefolde state of man (London, 1596), p. 34
46. John Moore, A Mappe of Mans Mortalitie (London, 1617), p. 7
47. Schnucker, 'Puritan attitudes', p. 114
48. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans
49. William Perkins, Of Christian Oeconomie in The Works (London, 1616-18), Vol. III, p. 694
50. Richard Jones, A Briefe and Necessarie Catechisme (London, 1583), sig.Cvir
51. See Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals:Humans and Beasts in EarlyModern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 40-6
52. Sommerville, Discovery, p. 136
53. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Treatise of Exposition Upon the Ten Commandments (London, 1603), sig. 8r
54. William Perkins, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to Gods Word, in Works, Vol. I, p. 448
55. Greenham, 'Of joy and sorrow', p. 348
56. Perkins, Direction, p. 448
57. Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 10 and 12
58. Bartholomew Batty, The Christian mans Closet (London, 1581), sig.8r
59. Perkins, Of Christian Oeconomie, p. 694
60. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1634), p. 536
61. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939) trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 140
62. Skinner argues that the 'civilizing process' had an impact upon laughing which was 'an obvious instance of an uncontrolled reaction that needed, in polite society, to be governed and preferably eliminated'. Skinner, 'Why laughing mattered', p. 445
63. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), sig. C2v
64. See Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), especially pp. 207-53
65. JohnDod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly forme ofHoushold Government (London, 1603), sig. R2v