April-Jun 2021 - 17th Century

Pictures: Sultan Mehmed VI, Ottoman Empire - Rene Descartes with Queen Christina of Sweden - Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu the founder of Japan's last shogunate

A few Highlights:

Galileo discovers the rings of Saturn,
the European colonization of America begins in earnest,
Ming Dynasty collapses,
absolute monarchy in France,
first publication of the King James Bible,
the Thirty Years War,
the Irish Rebellion,
Ottoman war with Venice,
English Civil War,
the Great Plague of London,
Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia , Mathematica,
the first known operational reflecting telescope is built by Isaac Newton,
the first measurement of the speed of light
and most importantly, Tea and Coffee become popular in Europe.

Wikipedia timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_century

a list of qualifying books: https://www.librarything.com/tag/17th+century and associated tag mashes

Don't forget to update the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Quarterly_Theme_Rea...

I have a good number of books to choose from for this read:

The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Downside: it's 1,271 pages!
The Shape of Mercy
2 books about the Mayflower voyage.

I'm thinking if I start Pepys now, I might be able to finish in April, sometime.

I've got quite a bit for this second quarter. Three Norton Criticals of Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques, Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, and John Donne's Poetry. I've also got a biography each of Jonson and Donne.

I'd also like to get around to Christopher Hill's Puritanism & Revolution: The English Revolution of the 17th Century. And I think I may have bought Nicholas McDowell's recently published Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (though it shows up in my catalog as both "Your Library" and "Wishlist" so I'm not sure, and I don't want to go off buying a duplicate until I can check out my stacks).

i have finished Der Astronom und die Hexe, a very good non-fiction book about Johannes Kepler and the legal action against his mother who was accused of being a witch.

I read Witch Child by Celia Rees set in the year 1660, it is a story of a young girl who was raised by a woman who was hung as a witch. She is spirited away and sent to America but unfortunately is placed among the Puritans. When she is recognized she must flee for her life to the wilderness. I enjoyed the story and look forward to picking up the sequel.

Puritanism and Revolution: The English Revolution of the 17th Century (1958) by Christopher Hill (1912-2003), the premier Marxist historian of the English Revolution. This is an early work by Hill, actually a collection and reworking of previously published essays, and like most academics' early works tends a bit toward tendentiousness and an overly academic writing style. His best book, which I read decades ago, may be The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, an encyclopedic study of the various revolutionary sects from Presbyterians on the right to Ranters and Fifth Monarchists on the far left.

I also years ago read his Cromwell biography God's Englishman but don't have a strong recollection of it; hard to compete biographically with Antonia Fraser (Cromwell: Our Chief of Men).

I used to have a copy (decades ago) of his Milton and the English Revolution around the house somewhere. I'm doing some clean-up this summer, and if I don't find it I may get another copy on ABE, because I really do want to get around to reading it before I join John Milton in the great hereafter.

3½*** for Puritanism and Revolution, mainly because of its final two chapters, the penultimate on Andrew Marvell and the especially good final chapter on Richardson's Clarissa.

I completed both The Diary of Samuel Pepys and The Shape of Mercy. They were both good reads.

In May I read The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton. Set in 17th century England and New England, this novel tells the story of Elizabeth Winthrop, neice of the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. I enjoyed the book very much for its depiction of Puritan New England and of Elizabeth, whom John Winthrop called his “unregenerate neice.”

>9 dianelouise100: One of my favorite novels. Seton is an overlooked but accomplished novelist, I think. Wide ranging in her scope, which could explain why today she's mistakenly bypassed. Marketing has forced writers into narrow aisles of production, designed to appeal to target audiences.

Good meaty novels become rarer and rarer while mass market genre fiction floods and threatens to drown us in low quality diversions. A syndrome of our disposable society?

I certainly agree that Seton is a fine novelist. I read several of her novels as a teenager. The one I remember best is Katherine, which I loved! And I have never had trouble remembering that particular segment of the Wars of the Roses. I think she was thorough in her research and gave her reader a good feel for the time periods she chose. I find that in my search for rewarding novels, I’m reading far fewer of the recent releases and turning to earlier, often deeper works—pre-1980’s.

I have finished Bürger, Bauern, Söldner und Gesandte, a non-fiction book about the Thirty Years's War in my native region, Westfalia. This was quite instructive.

Double post. LT is acting weirdly today. So let's just add that I watched a documentary about the siege of La Rochelle yesterday and am going to read Die Schatten von La Rochelle because of it.

And I have finished Die Schatten von La Rochelle wich turned out to be fabulous. Well-researched, well-written. It is the last year of Richelieu's life, and it is told mainly from the perspective of his favourite niece Marie. In this respect it reminded me of Dumas' Le sphinx rouge. We also jump forward and backwards in time, and you need to know a bit about the times of Richelieu, or you'll get lost among the many players in the Cinq-Mars conspiracy. But it's really a great story.

The Age of Reason Begins by Will and Ariel Durant, 2½**

Not bad, but it's a Reader's Digest view of history. It runs from the mid-16th through the mid-17th centuries, roughly from the late 1550s through the late 1640s, so it does fit in with this quarter's time period.

In addition to its rather simplistic approach, a big defect is in its discussion of the visual arts. The Durants give very cursory discussions to each of numerous paintings by Poussin, VanDyke, Hals, Rubens, and Rembrandt; but the text itself includes only a very few illustrations of the paintings and those which it includes are in poor quality black-and-white. (My copy, though, is a BMOC and it may be that a first edition would be better illustrated; I don't know.)

As to the Durants' discussion of literature, UGH! Alright, I just happen to disagree with them in their derogatory view of John Webster, but they give Thomas Middleton (whom T.S. Eliot considered the second greatest English playwright) all of a sentence or two. Their discussion of the period's French literature is rather elementary. As to Spanish, it's a subject that I don't know; but the quality of their discussion of Calderon and Lope de Vega is such that it would be trivial if I knew these two playwrights.

I had been thinking of giving a shot to the Durants' volume 8, The Age of Louis XIV; but now I'm not sure, especially given the length of these volumes and the very little time left in this quarter. I've just given a small start to Nicholas McDowell's recently published Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton, which looks quite interesting. It's shorter, just a bit over 400 pages (though also including extensive end-noting), and Milton's my favorite poet.

McDowell's much more sophisticated a writer than the Durants, but I'll get a good deal more out of him considering my already strong knowledge of Milton.

Also, I just bought Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (over 2000 pages), and I may give a read to The Changeling and A Game at Chess for starters. (The one Middleton play I've read in the past few years is The Roaring Girl.)

>9 dianelouise100: I probably like that book more than Katherine, as much as I loved it. Excellent read

I have finished Les deux régentes which looks at Marie de Médicis and Anne d'Autriche. Knowledge of the basic facts of the times are essential, as the author doesn't spend much time on detailing the constant warfare.

And my last book for this time period is Alatriste which contains the first three novels in a series set in XVIIth century Spain.

I've failed to finish Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but I'll be continuing on with it throughout the rest of this year. (I also have the The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford World's Classics) which, while lacking Vendler's close readings, does include useful textual notes regarding language and context; these are good for a second approach.) While I've read the sonnets in bits and pieces over the years, I've never gone straight through the entire cycle end-to-end. I consider the Sonnets to be 17th Century rather than 16th because the folio was published in, I believe, 1609 or thereabouts even though some of the sonnets are definitely dated to the 1590s; and the entire sequence also has a darker, more Jacobean feel to it than the Elizabethan-era plays.

And I only got a short way through Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton by Nicholas McDowell, which I'll also finish when I get a chance. Not a terribly high priority, because although it's pretty good, it's not a complete stand-out to someone like myself who's read numerous critical and biographical works on the writer I personally consider the greatest poet. (Shakespeare the greatest writer, yes, but as a dramatist, not as a poet.)

>18 MissWatson: oh I loved these books! was thinking of using them but I wanted something I hadn't read before. One of my fav series