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A Lotmanian Approach to the Ideological Function of Honour in Early Modern English Texts

Paper · 2013 · Jesús López-Peláez Casellas

Summary

The paper asks how the concept of honour functioned ideologically in English moral and political prose of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and why its meaning changed so sharply during that period. The author first traces its classical roots: Greek aretē and aidōs, Aristotle's linking of honour to virtue, and Cicero's honestas. He then reads Tudor and Stuart treatises and conduct books, including Elyot, Bryskett, Ashley and Cleland, through Yuri Lotman's typology of cultures, combined with Raymond Williams' categories of residual, emergent and dominant culture. The core argument is that two honour codes overlapped. The older medieval one was built on oaths, lineage, prowess and personal independence. The newer one placed honour under the monarch and made it a relative value granted from outside. This overlap explains the contradictions found in texts of the period. Hobbes' view of honour as mere opinion of power marks the endpoint. The study is presented as groundwork for reading honour in the drama and poetry of the era.

Key points

  • Classical sources:
    • Aristotle defines honour as "the reward of virtue," granted by one's peers and subordinate to virtue.
    • Cicero ties honesty to the four cardinal virtues and subordinates the individual to country.
  • Lotman's framework: his typology (from Stat'i po tipologii kul'tury, read here in Spanish translation) distinguishes four cultural modes: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romanticism. Each mode is defined by how paradigmatic (symbolic) and syntagmatic (relational) dimensions of the sign combine.
  • Corpus of treatises:
    • Elyot's Boke Named the Gouernor (1531) and Guevara's Diall of Princes (1529, English version by North in 1557).
    • Segar (1590), Norden (1597), Ashley's Of honour (1600), Bryskett (1606) and Cleland (1607).
    • Milles (1610) and the two Markhams (1624, 1625).
  • Signs of the shift:
    • Cleland allows only the king to dishonour a subject.
    • Hobbes' Leviathan (1651, ch. 10) treats worth as a price set by others' judgement.
  • Later evidence: a 1711 epitaph (Sir Robert Atkyns) praises loyalty and an orderly life and leaves out glory and prowess entirely.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper models a concept's history as layers that coexist: residual, dominant and emergent senses can all be active in one period, which explains apparent inconsistency rather than dismissing it.
  • I2. Honour shifts from an intrinsic quality to a relational one that depends on who grants it (peers, then the king, then Hobbes' "opinion of power").
  • I3. The author treats one text holding two incompatible stances as meaningful evidence; his example is Bryskett both condemning retaliation and demanding aggressive defence of one's name.
  • I4. Aidōs and English "shame" are shown to overlap only partly, with aidōs covering respect and restraint as well as fear of disapproval.
  • I5. The epitaph argument uses the absence of expected vocabulary (no glory, no prowess) as evidence that a culture has changed.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Value and ontology entries for words like "honour" could carry dated sense layers, so a reader picks the layer that fits the text's period instead of assuming one fixed meaning.
  • I2 (world): Reputation-like states could be stored as relations between a holder, a grantor and the grounds, rather than as properties, so that questions about who gave or took away honour become answerable.
  • I3 (frames): The pragmatics layer could flag clashing evaluative stances by the same speaker within a text and expose them, rather than silently keeping only the last one.
  • I4 (back): Translation through the meta-world should map words to bundles of sense components, so that a partial equivalent is rendered with its missing parts made explicit.
  • I5 (answer): QA over tales could support "what is notably not said" reasoning by comparing a text's frames against those expected for its genre, with that gap reported explainably.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de JaénJaén · Spain3 works · 1,661 citations

📚 Shelves 3 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works Classics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Jesús López-Peláez Casellas. 2013. A Lotmanian Approach to the Ideological Function of Honour in Early Modern English Texts. Interlitteraria 18.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.12697/il.2013.18.1.02

@inproceedings{casellas2013lotmanian,
  title = {{A Lotmanian Approach to the Ideological Function of Honour in Early Modern English Texts}},
  author = {Jesús López-Peláez Casellas},
  booktitle = {Interlitteraria 18},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.12697/il.2013.18.1.02},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.12697/il.2013.18.1.02}
}

References

49 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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