Katherine Austen

Katherine Austen (1629-ca.1683) was a British diarist and poet best known for Book M, her manuscript collection of meditations, journal entries, and verse.

Austen was born in London, one of seven children, to Katherine Wilson (d. 1648) and her husband Robert (d. 1639), a draper. She married Thomas Austen (1622–1658), a barrister, in 1645. After his death at the age of 36, she entered into an involved legal battle with his family in order to retain his manor in Middlesex for her three children, Thomas, Robert, and Anne.

Her manuscript of 114 folios, Book M (BL, Add. MS 4454), was written over six or seven years during her period of mourning — her “Most saddest Yeares” (60r) — and includes material on her lawsuit, interpretations of dreams (her own and others), historical commentary, prayers, letters, financial materials, and 34 verse meditations in rhyming couplets.

She declined to remarry, citing her regard for her late husband and her fears for the financial interests of her children. The date of her death is unknown but her will was proved in 1683.

Robert Atherton

Robert Atherton (1861 – 1930) was an English poet. Born in Liverpool, Lancashire in 1861, Atherton spent his youth as a ploughboy but later took holy orders at St. Aidan’s Theological College, Birkenhead, and afterwards became Rector of the parish church at Bolnhurst in Bedfordshire, a post he occupied for 15 years.

Whilst there, he began writing what became an extensive collection of verse which caused some to regard him as the ‘Lancashire Burns’. During this time he acquired the nickname Robin O’ Bobs and the reputation of an eccentric.

He left the church in 1904, and became a ‘wandering poet’, living for a time in Birmingham and Manchester before returning to his native Kirkby to live at Pear Tree Farm, where he resided until his death in 1930. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Chad’s, Kirkby parish church.

Valentine Ackland

Valentine Ackland (20 May 1906 – 9 November 1969) was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry. Born Mary Kathleen Valentine Ackland and nicknamed Molly by her family, Ackland was the child of privilege and of emotional abuse and neglect. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father Robert, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.

Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.

Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.

In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nineteen years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter’s long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908-1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).

Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted

After World War II, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.

Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.

In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.

In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.

Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription Non omnis moriar (“Death is not the end”) on her gravestone.

History of science in the Renaissance

During the Renaissance, great advances occurred in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, math, manufacturing, and engineering. The rediscovery of ancient scientific texts was accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention of printing which would democratize learning and allow a faster propagation of new ideas. But, at least in its initial period, some see the Renaissance as one of scientific backwardness. Historians like George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike have criticized how the Renaissance affected science, arguing that progress was slowed for some amount of time. Humanists favored human-centered subjects like politics and history over study of natural philosophy or applied mathematics. Others have focused on the positive influence of the Renaissance, pointing to factors like the rediscovery of lost or obscure texts and the increased emphasis on the study of language and the correct reading of texts.

Marie Boas Hall coined the term Scientific Renaissance to designate the early phase of the Scientific Revolution. More recently, Peter Dear has argued for a two-phase model of early modern science: a Scientific Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, focused on the restoration of the natural knowledge of the ancients; and a Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, when scientists shifted from recovery to innovation.

During and after the Renaissance of the 12th century, Europe experienced an intellectual revitalization, especially with regard to the investigation of the natural world. In the 14th century, however, a series of events that would come to be known as the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages was underway. When the Black Death came, it brought a sudden end to the previous period of massive scientific change. The plague killed 25–50% of the people in Europe, especially in the crowded conditions of the towns, where the heart of innovations lay. Recurrences of the plague and other disasters caused a continuing decline of population for a century.

The 14th century saw the beginning of the cultural movement of the Renaissance. The rediscovery of ancient texts was accelerated after the Fall of Constantinople, in 1453, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy. Also, the invention of printing was to have great effect on European society: the facilitated dissemination of the printed word democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas.

But this initial period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness. There were no new developments in physics or astronomy, and the reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion. At the same time, Humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics. Science would only be revived later, with such figures as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Descartes.

Content as pragmatic role

A concept may be abstracted from several perceptions, but that is only its origin. In regard to its meaning or its truth, William James proposed his Pragmatic Rule. This rule states that the meaning of a concept may always be found in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make (Some Problems of Philosophy, “Percept and Concept — The Import of Concepts”). In order to understand the meaning of the concept and to discuss its importance, a concept may be tested by asking, “What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?” There is only one criterion of a concept’s meaning and only one test of its truth. That criterion or test is its consequences for human behavior.

In this way, James bypassed the controversy between rationalists and empiricists regarding the origin of concepts. Instead of solving their dispute, he ignored it. The rationalists had asserted that concepts are a revelation of Reason. Concepts are a glimpse of a different world, one which contains timeless truths in areas such as logic, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. By pure thought, humans can discover the relations that really exist among the parts of that divine world. On the other hand, the empiricists claimed that concepts were merely a distillation or abstraction from perceptions of the world of experience. Therefore, the significance of concepts depends solely on the perceptions that are its references. James’s Pragmatic Rule does not connect the meaning of a concept with its origin. Instead, it relates the meaning to a concept’s purpose, that is, its function, use, or result.

Free writing

Free writing (also stream-of-consciousness writing) is a writing technique in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar or topic. It produces raw, often unusable material, but allows a writer to overcome blocks of apathy and self-criticism. It is used mainly by prose writers and writing teachers. This technique is also used by some writers to collect their initial thoughts and ideas on a topic, and is often used as a preliminary to more formal writing. It is not a form of automatic writing.

Freewriting was advanced in Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1975), and has been popularised by Julia Cameron through her book, The Artist’s Way (1992). Natalie Goldberg combined the notion of freewriting with principles of Zen Buddhist meditation and developed “writing practice”, described in books such as Writing Down the Bones (1986). Writing practice is different from freewriting encouraged in undergraduate and creative writing programs: writing practice encourages the writer to be aware of his or her thoughts throughout the writing practice, and may be an ends unto itself, rather than a means to produce a more polished piece later.

The technique involves continuous writing, usually for a predetermined period of time (often 5, 10, or 15 minutes). Writing is done without regard to spelling, grammar, etc., and no corrections are made. If the writer reaches a point where he or she cannot think of anything to write, then he or she writes that he or she cannot think of anything, until another line of thought is found. The writer allows himself or herself to stray off topic and to just let his or her thoughts lead wherever they may. At times, a writer may also do a focused freewrite where a chosen topic structures his or her thoughts. Expanding from this topic, the thoughts may stray to make connections and create more abstract views on the topic. This technique helps a writer to explore a particular subject before putting ideas into a more basic context.

Freewriting is often done on a daily basis as a part of the writer’s daily routine. Also, students in many writing courses are assigned to do such daily writing exercises.

Free writing is based on the presumption that everybody has something to say and the ability to say it, however the mental wellspring may be blocked by apathy, self-criticism, resentment, anxiety about deadlines, fear of failure or censure, or other forms of resistance. The accepted rules of free-writing enable a writer to build up enough momentum to blast past any blocks into uninhibited flow, the concept outlined by teachers in writing such as Louise Dunlap, Peter Elbow, Natalie Goldberg.

Often free-writing workshops focus on self-expression, and are sometimes even used in teaching to elementary school children. There is no common consensus on the acceptance of this technique.