Bentivolio and Urania

Bentivoglio and Urania is a prose historical romance and religious allegory written by Nathaniel Ingelo, and published from 1660 by Richard Marriot. It is identified as a Puritan work of fiction.[1] Regarded as an unsuccessful imitation of the Argenis of John Barclay, from four decades earlier, it has also been thought a possible source of inspiration for the Pilgrim's Progress (1678) of John Bunyan.[2]

Background

The prose romance form was briefly in vogue in England during the period 1650 to 1665, and the work (two volumes, 1660 and 1664) went through four editions by 1682. It sold well.[3][4][5] Its allegory in the style of Edmund Spenser was influenced by a work of Henry More, like Ingelo one of the Cambridge Platonists, the Psychodia Platonica from 1642.[6]

The title characters are explained by Ingelo in the book's introduction. In the allegory, Bentivolio represents God's will, Urania his sister heavenly light.[7] As it occurs in the Faerie Queene of Spenser, "heavenly light" is associated with knights in full armour, and with the purity of the soul, picking up on Christian mysticism's view of the soul illuminating the body.[8]

Content

The book was conceived as instructive, on the theme of the ascent of the soul.[5][7] It defends Puritan concepts of theocracy and divine providence, in the tradition of the Solyma Nova (1649) of Samuel Gott. It also gives an account of the Levellers' defeat.[9] The character Antitheus is portrayed negatively as a Hobbesian in the Interregnum sense.[10]

Notes
  1. Steven N. Zwicker (18 June 1998). The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. Cambridge University Press. p. 79 note 10. ISBN 978-0-521-56488-5.
  2. Argenis. Uitgeverij Van Gorcum. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-86698-316-7.
  3. Laura Lunger Knoppers (29 November 2012). The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. OUP Oxford. p. 551. ISBN 978-0-19-956060-8.
  4. Donald F. Bond; G. Sherburn (2 September 2003). The Literary History of England: Vol 3: The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789). Routledge. p. 794. ISBN 978-1-134-84781-5.
  5. McLellan, Ian William. "Ingelo, Nathaniel". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14385. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. S. Hutton (6 December 2012). Henry More (1614–1687) Tercentenary Studies: with a biography and bibliography by Robert Crocker. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 236. ISBN 978-94-009-2267-9.
  7. Douglas Hedley (25 February 2016). The Iconic Imagination. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 101. ISBN 978-1-4411-5191-9.
  8. A.C. Hamilton (2 September 2003). The Spenser Encyclopedia. Routledge. p. 1790. ISBN 978-1-134-93481-2.
  9. Nigel Smith (1997). Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660. Yale University Press. pp. 248–9. ISBN 978-0-300-07153-5.
  10. Jon Parkin (9 August 2007). Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700. Cambridge University Press. p. 321. ISBN 978-1-107-32118-2.
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