Colonial Virtue is the first study to focus on the role played by the virtue of temperance in shaping ethical debates about early English colonialism. Kasey Evans tracks the migration of ideas surrounding temperance from classical and humanist writings through to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century applications, emphasizing the ways in which they have transcended the vocabularies of geography and time. Colonial Virtue offers fresh insights into how English Renaissance writers used temperance as a privileged lens through which to view New World morality and politically to justify colonial practices in Virginia and the West Indies. Evans uses literary texts, including The Fairie Queene and The Tempest, and sources such as sermons, dictionaries, and visual artifacts, to navigate alliances between traditional semantics and post-colonial political criticism. Beautifully written and deeply engaging, Colonial Virtue also models an expansive methodology for literary studies through its close readings and rhetorical analyses.
Preface: Chapter 1: Temperance's Renaissance Transformations 1. Aristotle in Renaissance England 2. Temperance in Renaissance Iconography 3.Temperance and olonialism Part 1: Temperance Explores America Chapter 2: Edmund Spenser's "Blood Guiltie" Temperance 1.Guyon's Guilty Hands 2.What Guyon Disdains 3.Mourning the Tempest Chapter 3: Intemperance and "Weak Remembrance" in The Tempest 1.The Brain - Washed and Rewritten 2.On Cannibals, White Cannibals, and Liars 3.On Making the Old World New Part 2: Temperance Colonizes America Chapter 4: John Donne, Christopher Brooke, and Temperate Revenge in 1622 Jamestown 1.Donne and the post-posement of "temporall gayne" 2.Christopher Brooke's "temperate change" Chapter 5: Globalizing Temperance in Seventeenth-Century Economics 1. Good for the head, evil for the neck: The Body Politic Smokes Tobacco 2."The guts do carry the belly": Gerard Malynes 3.Coffee, chocolate, and efficiency in the New World 4.Conclusion Coda: Works Cited: