tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post7820508742329544477..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: Future history: Secularizing the SacredAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-20363231182995032672015-03-13T14:26:23.678-07:002015-03-13T14:26:23.678-07:00Ah - so the Henrician ref. is more to the point. I...Ah - so the Henrician ref. is more to the point. Interesting stuff - and hats off to anyone who's persisted with The Faerie Queene long enough to make sense of it.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-75629992199462867362015-03-13T03:41:30.699-07:002015-03-13T03:41:30.699-07:00I think Escobedo's emphasis, there, is on the ...I think Escobedo's emphasis, there, is on the 'national'. The examples you give are both international and there's a long pedigree of mapping Biblical prophesy onto global history. The jacket-flap copy is: "Andrew Escobedo here seeks to provide a new understanding of the emergence of national consciousness in England, showing that many Renaissance writers articulated their Englishness temporally, through an engagement with a history they perceived as lost or alienated. According to Escobedo, the English experienced nationalism as a form of community that disrupted earlier religious and social identities, making it difficult to link the national present to the medieval past. Furthermore, he argues, the English faced the nation's temporal isolation before the Enlightenment narrative of historical progress emerged as a means to interpret novelty in a positive light.Escobedo examines how John Foxe, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton used narrative representations of nationhood to mediate what they perceived as a troubling breach in history, attempting to bring together the English past, present, and near future in a complete and continuous story. Yet all four authors also register their concern that historical loss may be an inevitable feature of a "modern" England, and they come to see their narratives as long tapestries that spontaneously rip apart as they grow, obliging the weaver to return to repair them."Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-43499154496124225252015-03-13T02:34:03.639-07:002015-03-13T02:34:03.639-07:00I've got two immediate responses - one is to t...I've got two immediate responses - one is to think this makes an awful lot of sense, wonder how it connects up with the Henrician development of the notion of 'empire' and think vaguely about the irruption of the sacral into the secular more generally, Benjamin and all that.<br /><br />The other is to say - <i>making [Revelation] available as a source of national articulation</i>... what does that actually mean? Or what does it mean other than seeing the Balfour Declaration as a sign of the end times (as my grandfather did), or seeing the EU as the twelve-headed beast, or whatever? Because many people, in many periods, do <b>that</b>.Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.com