Week 6 (Sun 26th – Sat June 1st)

Wednesday 29th May Recollection Lecture: Piety vs. Polemic: The Paradox of Elizabethan Satire. Jane Cooper (All Souls).

In 1597 Joseph Hall – later a Bishop – declared himself England’s first satirist, writing in the manner of Juvenal and Horace in his satire Virgidemiarum. His declared purpose was to attack impiety in contemporary English society out of a sense of unavoidable moral duty (in Juvenal’s words, difficile est saturam nōn scrībere). The Bishops’ Ban of popular satire (1599) shows satire’s vituperative style and personal attacks were considered too rancorous, licentious, and even seditious for the Christian public. How did satirists respond to this tension between Christian piety and Roman-style rancour? With pseudonymous personae, whose opinions matched the satirist’s, but whose heightened style the satirist could disown.