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The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and Tyranny in Sidney's Defence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Robert E. Stillman
Robert E. Stillman*
Affiliation:
University of Tenessee
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Abstract

Against the “presentism “ of current criticism linking the Defence's universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The Defence's epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon — the so-called Philippists — and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , Winter 2002 , pp. 1287 - 1319
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2002

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