ABSTRACT
THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING:
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH IN THE AGE OF JOHNSON
This is the abstract to my dissertation
as it appears in the final project.
Fifteenth-century humanists traded the old schemes of history,
with their six ages or four monarchies, for a tripartite one with
ancient, middle, and modern periods. By the late seventeenth
century, however, their "modernity" had grown unwieldy, and
Dryden's contemporaries questioned whether they were part of the
same modernity as Erasmus and Shakespeare. What we call the
Renaissance was then first treated as "the last age." As the
still-unnamed age began to assume coherence, the eighteenth
century used the new conception as a standard against which to
measure its own achievements. What may seem at first the
province of recondite specialists -- critics, antiquarians,
historians, theologians -- was in fact essential to the
constitution of a British character, for these specialists set
the terms by which the modern nation was to be evaluated. John
Dryden, Alexander Pope, the Wartons, David Hume, and Thomas Gray
are all important here, but Samuel Johnson's works provide the
best case study of the ways in which eighteenth-century thinkers
conceived of the age of Elizbaeth as a period distinct from their
own. In editorial theory and canon formation, in scholarship, in
historiography, in church governance, in linguistic theory, and
in literary criticism, eighteenth-century British thinkers turned
to the age of Petrarch and Poliziano, Erasmus and Scaliger,
Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Queen Elizabeth. In short, the
eighteenth century defined itself by comparison and contrast with
the last age. Each chapter explores an aspect of
eighteenth-century British identity -- literary, scholarly,
political, religious, and linguistic identity -- and shows how it
depended on the culture of the age before.