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The article reviews the book "The Middleton Papers: The Financial Problems of a Yorkshire Recusant Family in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," edited by José Bosworth, Pat Hudson, Maureen Johnson, and Denise Shillitoe.

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of Little Poems for Children published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an expansion of educational space based on the integration of moral education in the spirit of the educational ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the Philanthropinists with poetical ideas and the nature of the child in both the content and the form of his poems. His poems were translated almost immediately into English, French and, surprisingly, as many of his poems were more or less adaptations of poems by Weisse and Burmann, into German too. Van Alphen’s trump card was a reversal of former strategies of education: instead of pressing moral ideas upon the children from an adult point of view, he aimed at identification by (1) writing from the perspective of children, (2) situating the poems in the world of experience of children, (3) using a childlike style with a frolicking metre, rhyme scheme and prosody, and (4) combining text and images, so putting the moral message across visually and textually at the same time. In this paper, we follow the journey of poems for children as media for the cultural transmission of moral educational ideas from Germany to the Netherlands from the perspective of cultural transmission, moral literacy and educational space. We conclude that Van Alphen, with the combined power of text and image, successfully adopted and adapted former educational strategies, such as the moral poetics developed by his German predecessors Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann. Taking their strategies on a poetic journey from Germany to the Netherlands, he not only transferred them, but transformed them as well. Van Alphen did so in a specific Dutch utilitarian way. His poems could be read for fun but were intended for learning. They were useful and entertaining at the same time, because he took the life and living environment of children into account, and particularly accounted for the concept of development as a distinguishing characteristic of the specific nature of the child with which child readers could identify. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that John Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache marks an important shift in the literary uses of emotion by revising the discourse of melancholic suffering in order to help a merchant-class patron confront socio-economic anxieties. In his misogynist poem, Lydgate imagines a world where wives dominate their husbands and force them to fall victim to a man-eating monster. The poem thus focuses on a melancholic masculinity that is captive to grief and trapped in a feminized subject position. Bycorne and Chychevache 's masculine melancholy addresses the fifteenth-century merchant's concerns about household governance, business success, and the building of a lasting legacy. But, in a striking reversal, Lydgate reimagines melancholy as a sign of power and privilege, and departs radically from the traditional narrative of melancholy as he converts feelings of disempowerment into signs of masculine exceptionality. In so doing, Lydgate anticipates early modern writers' understanding of melancholic suffering as not only a mark of spiritual and intellectual greatness in men, but also an affect that a man might adopt by choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the friendship poetry of British poets Mary Steele and Mary Scott, including Scott's poem "On Friendship Addressed to Sylvia, 1770" and Steele's poems "To Myra, 1772" and "To Miss Scott on Reading the Female Advocate". According to the author, the poems illustrate the nurturing aspects of their friendship and their shared experiences of societal resistance . Other topics include religious nonconformism, illness, and marriage.

This article examines Lucy Hutchinson's pervasive materialism, arguing that her use of corporeal imagery – in part shaped by her early translation of Lucretius – contributes to the soteriological purposes of her later works in multiple ways. Criticism on Hutchinson has tended to divorce the materialist imagery of her translation from the Calvinistic themes of her other writings. I argue, however, for the lasting presence of a materialism constructed from the vocabularies of Lucretian Epicureanism, Neoplatonism and John Owen. Focusing especially on the poem Order and Disorder and Hutchinson's theological tract to her daughter, I show how she uses materialism as a "means" to achieving assurance and grace. I suggest that these various responses to physical experience are part of Hutchinson's enduring investigation into the ontology of "Order" and "Disorder", and her quest for stable spiritual being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places the composition and publication of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum within the context of particular periods in the life of Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland and her daughter, Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. Lanyer's use of mirroring, shared discourse, possible worlds and reconstruction of memory all relate to these periods and were designed to engage the interest of Russell and Clifford. Through the identification of the period of the women's stay in Cookham in 1604, Lanyer's poetic strategies – directly appealing to Russell – can be identified. Lanyer's decision to publish her verse collection in 1610 was also influenced by events in the lives of Russell and Clifford, thus providing insight into Lanyer's canny understanding of patronage in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maninbo (10,000 Lives), Ko Un's 30-volume series of poems published between 1986 and 2010, represents a meeting point between history and literature. It can be seen either as historical writing in the form of poetry or as a literary narrative with historical content. The poet reconstructs the entire scheme of Korean history through the life-stories of numerous individuals, thus transforming their lived experiences into narrated history. Maninbo bears some characteristics of social biography, which is one way of writing history. However, it differs from other styles of social biography in its poetic sketches of thousands of individuals, which ultimately comprise a grand mosaic of Korean history. As a social biography, Maninbo reveals the ideals underlying modern Korean society: national independence, democracy, desire for reunification, and, most of all, humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses women poets writing in England in the 15th and 16th centuries known as "petticoat authors," and examines the social conditions which led large numbers of women to become writers. Poems including "The Increasing and Decreasing of Visible Fire" and "Of the Sound of Waters, Air, Flame, More Than Earth or Air Without Flame" by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and "Song" by Ann Finch are also critiqued.