Recluse

Abstract: Part 1: A social history of psychological knowledge: the controversy over thought psychology in Germany, 1900-20 Introduction to Part 1 1. The Wurzburgers 2. Friends and foes 3. Recluse or drillmaster versus interlocutor and interrogator 4. Purist versus promiscuist 5. Collectivist versus individualist 6. Protestant versus Catholic 7. Conclusions Interlude Part 2: The Sociophilosophy of folk psychology Introduction to Part 2 8. The folk psychology debate 9. Folk psychology as a social institution

Abstract: The Life of Christiana of Markyate gives an exceptionally vivid account of the struggles of a young girl, vowed at an early age to celibacy, to escape the matrimonial snares set by her parents and her friends. She was born of well-to-do burgesses of Huntingdon in the opening years of the twelfth century, who succeeded in betrothing her to a local nobleman. But the marriage was not consummated, and eventually she escaped, became a recluse and a nun, and the prioress of a small community at Markyate in Hertfordshire, under the patronage of the abbot and monks of St Albans, who made the famous St Albans' Psalter for her. The Life, written by one of her chaplains largely from her own reminiscences, was discovered, or rediscovered, by C.H. Talbot in a Cotton Manuscript in the British Library. First published by the Clarendon Press in 1959, it is now reissued. It is one of the remarkable discoveries of our time, and a classic of historical literature.

Abstract: This study offers a reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Dr Roe presents a detailed examination of both writers' debt to radical dissent in the years before 1789. Wordsworth's first-hand experience of revolution in France is treated in depth, and both Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are clarified. In each case the poets are shown to have been vividly alive to radical issues in Britain and France, and much more closely involved with the popular reform movement represented by the London Corresponding Society than has hitherto been suspected. The author argues against any generalized pattern of withdrawal from politics into retirement after 1795. He offers instead a reading of "Lyrical Ballads", "The Prelude", and "The Recluse" that emphasizes the integration of imaginative life and radical experience. For Coleridge the loss of revolutionary idealism prefigured the collapse of his creative and personal life after 1798. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, revolutionary failure was the key to his emergence as the poet of "Tintern Abbey".

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Anglo-Saxon and European background 2. The rise of the hermit in England 3. The rise of the recluse 4. How anchorites made a living 5. Eradicating sin, in theory 6. Eradicating sin, in practice 7. How anchorites helped others 8. How anchorites became saints Conclusion