Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts

“WE MAY QUICKLY EXCEED a mediocrity, even in the praise of Mediocrity,” cautioned John Donne in a 1625 sermon.1 With a destabilizing paradox, Donne invoked the venerable norm of “mediocrity” or the “golden mean” to warn his contemporaries against the danger of overuse. Twenty-first-century readers might well conclude that early modern authors, including Donne, celebrated the mean to excess. Yet, as his admonition suggests, the mean was not only a cultural commonplace but also a source of controversy. This book studies English literary representations of means and extremes from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Classical in origin, the notion of a virtuous mean between two vicious extremes figured crucially in the writings of educated early modern English authors. Historians and literary scholars have studied the concept’s importance for the period’s struggles concerning the national church and the constitution. This study is the first, however, to examine a broad variety of literary treatments of the mean-extremes polarity as representations of major cultural tensions extending far beyond— though often related to—ecclesiological and constitutional conflicts. Early modern authors apply the schema to numerous aspects of personal and collective life in innovative, surprising, and contentious ways. Writers not only construct highly original versions of themean; they also advocate various extremes. Donne himself transforms the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while the aggressively modern Francis Bacon holds extremism necessary for human empowerment. Erotic literature pits extreme passion against temperate conjugal love; symposiastic or drinking-party poetry extols polemically defined norms of sociable moderation or of intoxicating excess. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgic poets laud the nation as the embodiment of the golden mean, warn against national excesses, or urge extreme ways of increasing the nation’s power and wealth. Challenging his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ erotic, symposiastic, and georgic writings, John Milton deploys the mean to celebrate ideals of pleasurable restraint and self-respect that his countrymen have ignored to their peril. Such literary adaptations and transformations of an ancient opposition figure centrally in the emergence of a deeply divided, ambivalent, yet self-consciously modern English culture. In both conspicuous and subtle ways, furthermore, these clashing treatments of means and extremes continue to resonate within contemporary cultural debates. © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.