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The analysis and discussion of Elizabethan sermon styles and major psychological and conceptual problems which participate in the formation of these styles is approached in two ways, of which the first investigates the sermons themselves, and the second, specific controversial and discursive works. Since the primary evidence of style is the distinctive existence of any given sermon, the sermons are analysed for the information which they provide on three deeply implicated fields: the context of the sermon, with special attention given to the preacher's perception of and theories about his own function,about his relation to his audience, and about the individual and corporate natures of that audience; the text of the sermon, that is, the manner in which the Biblical text is interpreted and influences the organisation of the sermon; and the modes of argumentation by which the multiple possibilities of the text are made to realise particular purposes. In order to indicate more exactly the nature of changes taking place in the Elizabethan sermon, the period has been broadly divided into two parts, with Archbishop Grindal's letter to the Queen on 20 December 1576, defending the puritan exercises,as the symbolic point of division. For efficient comparison it has been necessary to make reference to preachers of the generation before 1558, and to provide a specific control upon interpretation three sermons from each portion of the Elizabethan period have been chosen and are the subject of comparative analysis. The purpose of this analysis is to discover what may be called semantic forms in the three sermons, understanding these to be verbal structures synthesising dominant experiential and cognitive concerns which have been progressively elaborated in the preceding discussion. Sermon style is identified with these expressive forms, and not only with rhetorical categories or literary-aesthetic determinations. The second part provides another perspective upon particular questions which arise in the sermons, and upon the broad underlying movements in the experience and conception of which style is the most sensitive register. Once again this part is divided into two sections: in the first, certain aspects of two major controversies of special relevance in the formation of the Elizabethan church, those between Jewel and Harding, and Whitgift and Cartwright, are shown to localise issues of much more general significance; and in the second, three subjects which further reveal conceptual problems fundamental to the evolution of Elizabethan thought,in the areas of psychology, logic and rhetoric, and science are investigated. While these subjects involve all thinking men of the period in some way,/interactive relation with the sermon analysis is maintained by concentrating principally upon clerical representation of them. It becomes apparent that consideration of style in terms of literary values or terminology is inadequate both to characterise those elements of prose expression which represent the distinctive features of the thought and experience of individuals or groups, and to correlate the descriptions of these expressive forms with areas of development in the culture of a particular period where contemporaneous definition of concepts,apart from these forms, is necessarily lacking. The classifications attempted are understood to be indicative rather than definitive, since the relation between the content of a culture, the quality of its realisation in individual and group consciousness, and its communication and transformation, is of extreme complexity. It is more clearly focussed in the consideration of what was known or believed, and what was perceived as uncertain or unknowable, about human nature itself and the external world, and particularly about the nature and function of language as the means of relation.

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Recent criticism on the Renaissance has drawn attention to an interest in the sixteenth century in the rhetorical methods of argumentation which were used to support, and lend legitimation to, new positions or ideas. Such methods of 'proof', which were designed to create belief, replaced the logical methods of argumentation of the medieval scholastics, which were designed instead to discover the true principles of a particular line of enquiry. I explore a different and complementary method for the creation of credibility, a method which derives from the same Roman rhetorical tradition, and which was promoted by Renaissance writers including Philip Sidney. This method originates with Marcus Tullius Cicero, although Cicero himself suggests that he is inspired by the Socrates of Plato's dialogues. The claim of Plato's Socrates not to know the rhetorical techniques for producing eloquence, a claim which is meant to indicate that his speech is prompted by a genuine knowledge of true principles, is interpreted by Cicero itself as a rhetorical strategy for creating an ironic persona which conceals the studied nature of his expression and which thus gains him in the credence, and trust, of his audience. In his rhetorical manuals Cicero imitates, and thus demonstrates, this supposed ironic strategy, for two seemingly contradictory reasons: on the one hand, he wishes to elevate the status of the art of rhetoric - the art held in contempt by Plato - showing that it is a legitimate and fundamental tool for intellectual enquiry; on the other hand, he wants to conceal the studied nature of his own eloquence so that his audience believe that he speaks as nature or truth prompts him.

Critics have commonly assumed that, in <I>The Faerie Queene</I>, and in allegorical literature generally, the figurative meaning of the text is unknowable in principle to the characters who take part in its literal narrative vehicle, and may rather be discovered only by the text's readers. But in fact there are two quite different kinds of allegory: in one, the figurative meaning of the text does (as such critics suppose of all allegory) constitute a distinct structure or 'world' from the imaginary world constituted by its narrative vehicle; but in the other, the figurative meaning <I>coexists</I> with the text's literal meaning inside a single imaginary world. Essentially the same types were distinguished by Christian Biblical exegetes throughout the Middle Ages; but medieval writers theorized the distinction in terms of the fictionality or truth of the text's literal meaning, a characterization which is accurate so far as it goes, but problematic for a modern theorist in that it is designed as an account only of Biblical allegory rather than of allegory more generally, and presupposes Christian piety as the basis of its distinction between allegory's two kinds. Recasting the distinction in terms of the figurative meaning's existence or non-existence inside the imaginary work of the literal narrative allows us to discern the presence of the two kinds both in allegorical literature generally and in <I>The Faerie Queene</I> in particular. In Books One to Three of Spenser's poem, it is primarily for the characters who inhabit the world of the narrative that both the literal and figurative meanings of the poem exist; as readers, we apprehend the two kinds of meaning and the relation between them primarily through their imaginary experience.

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The secular amatory lyric in Scottish vernacular literature of the period 1560 - 1604 is the subject of this thesis which is critical and theoretical in its approach. In historical and cultural terms, the study is concerned with lyric poetry associated with the courts of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI; the work of principle lyricists (for example, Alexander Scott Alexander Montgomerie, William Fowler, William Alexander) is analysed individually but the thesis also pursues the literary and cultural implications of neglected anonymous material in manucript miscellanies. The thesis argues that the tension between imitation and invention, which James VI identified in this critical treatise of 1584 as the chief impetus for a newly redefined nationalist poetic, lies at the heart of the period's amatory lyric. The pressure to recreate and reinvent this genre is analysed in three main fields: (1) rhetoric (the vexed issue of language and self-presentation; the mannerist exaggerations of amatory conceit by Alexander Montgomerie); (2) philosophies of desire (the reconception of Neoplatonic amatory thought by Mary Queen of Scott's lyrics; the rewriting of Petrarch's theological resolution of secular desire by William Fowler) (3) construction so 'the feminine' (who the female believed is rhetorically and symbolically conceived; how the feminine voice and the female desiring subject profoundly challenge a masculine literary system; how a feminist reading strategy influences the reception of these lyrics). Ultimately the thesis seeks to demonstrate (by a combination of critical and theoretical analysis, and cultural contextualisation) how various practitioners of the Scottish secular love lyric fashioned distinctive and innovative forms of the genre.

This is a study into literary and other responses to the Latin poet Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, 39-65 AD) and his narrative of the Roman civil wars, now called the Bellum Ciuile, in English culture between approximately 1589 and 1630. Chapter One introduces Lucan's as a Renaissance text and explains the study's overall aims, methodology and principles. Part I examines the reading contexts and practices shaping responses to Lucan during the period. It investigates his position in the humanist education system (Chapter Two) and the nature and consequences of theoretical disputes over his generic status (Chapter Three). Part II offers detailed studies of individual readings. Chapter Four examines the translation of Lucan by Arthur Gorges (1614), Chapter Five the Latin commentary of Thomas Famaby (1618), and Chapter Six Thomas May's translation of Lucan (1626 to 1627) and his tragedy Cleopatra (1626), a play heavily dependent on the Bellum Ciuile. Chapter Seven discusses 'Caesarist readers' who responded chiefly to Lucan's portrait of Julius Caesar, focusing on Christopher Marlowe's translation of the first book (uncertain in date) and the Observations upon Caesars Commentaries by Clement Edmundes (published 1600-1609). Chapter Eight, the last, summarises the study's findings.

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