Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the Lipsian Paradigm in England, 1584-1650

Gordon DesBrisay is an assistant professor of history at the University
of Saskatchewan.

In this quietly ambitious study, Adriana McCrea sets out to offer a
fresh perspective on the much-studied political and literary culture of
late 16th- and early 17th-century England. Blending the historian’s
concern for intellectual and political context with the close readings
of a literary critic, she reviews in successive chapters the careers and
writings of five well-known Jacobean figures: Sir Walter Ralegh, Francis
Bacon, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, and Bishop Joseph Hall. The common
thread linking these rather disparate figures, she argues, is that they
operated within a neostoic or “Lipsian” paradigm.

Justus Lipsius was a Flemish humanist who responded to the late
16th-century Wars of Religion with a distinctive synthesis termed
neostoicism, a blend of Christian stoic morality and Tacitean political
and historical analysis. Lipsius was a controversial figure whose
conformity to Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism in turn was much
criticized—not least by James VI of Scotland, who called him “that
proud inconstant Lipsius.” This was one of James’s little
drolleries, for Lipsius’s work hinged on the problem of how to pursue
“right reason” and moral “constancy” within this wayward world,
without withdrawing from it.

Buffeted by the vicissitudes and intrigues of English high politics,
Dr. McCrea’s five exemplary Jacobeans all struggled, in their lives
and in their writings (which the author rightly seeks to connect), with
the problem of political virtue and constancy. Lipsius, she argues,
though seldom acknowledged in their writings (he was, after all, not
popular with the king whose favor they curried), provided not so much an
example or a set of prescriptions, as a method and a language within
which to frame their discussions. It was a method flexible enough to
serve the spurned royal counsels of Ralegh, the peculiarly English
humanism of Bacon, the tortured Calvinism of Greville, the barbed
poetics of Jonson, and the Anglican authoritarianism of Hall.

A subtle, closely argued, and ultimately convincing book written in
somewhat dry prose, this monograph belongs in every university library
and should not be overlooked by advanced students of early modern
English political and literary culture.