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So, I've got to finish up my 506 essay today - it's due. I'm awake, and I'm warming up my brain with a good cup of coffee - I was thinking, "I'm concerned that my writing seems a bit rambling in my essays, but I'm also in a bit of a pinch. My normal academic writing is extremely concise, even to the point of being a little abrupt. I agonize over transitions. In the effort to condense a lot into as little space as possible, I end up writing these over-convoluted sentences. Maybe being a little wordy is actually good for being read?" To get ready for the day, and straighten out my thoughts, I figured I might write here.
Actually, the stuff I've been reading for 506 has been on my mind from the perspective of Mage: the Awakening. I've been doing my writing on William Walwyn, a religious and medical writer who wrote on behalf of religious seperatists and was accused of being a "Leveller," or a religious political group who wanted to remove distinctions of social heirarchy. Along with other writers like Gerrard Winstanley, he advocated for religious tolerance and was often accused of communism and promoting anarchy. (Ah yes, the 17th century red scare.)
I'm analyzing his rhetorical construction of the university in his essay, "The Compassionate Samaritan". His writing seems to hold formal academics in disdain or considers them to be unimportant while, simultaniously, he says that their training in rhetoric and theology allows them to talk circles around critics. I mean, it seems like he's being inconsistant and would could chalk it up to being disingenuous, but he's really not.
First, you have to realize that his approach to civil heirarchy is one of skepticism, but he never really advocates for a dissolution of government. Not only are there indications I cite in "Samaritan" itself, but he writes both anonymously and under his own name (imprisoned from the Tower of London, no less) of the need for certain governmental powers to promote a peaceful nation. So, you know, he's not just bagging on university structure because it's structured - there has to be other reasons. And there are - more than one - so, it's not exactly incredibly complicated, but the desire to condense a complex discussion into a single talking point is always present. Instead, he's critical of the idea that university training has an essential or even divine nature that elevates it above lay discussion. He's also critical of this use of status that comes from being in a social group that implicitly and explicitly supports an unequal power structure. These kind of feed into one another, and it can be difficult to seperate out to the point that we simply need to allow for the issues to blend together.
What becomes interesting, once you're seeing how Walwyn has constructed the university in "Samaritan," is that there's an implicit understanding that the reader is aware of what a university is for. There's actually a split that we'd consider strange between emergent mechanical sciences and theological education, and who backs what. A scholar named Christopher Hill discusses that in depth, but you can also find it in tracts that get run off anywhere in the 1600's. (It's some real Sorcerer's Crusade shit, to be frank.) CoE supporting bishops and academically educated divines support a university structure that focuses on theological education, and so universities are very commonly understood as culturally important but practically useless. There's an explosion of really bad science that's just starting out - attempts at astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, physics, are all very crude. These are not really approved of by the church, as men really aren't supposed to be meddling in the affairs of God. So, they're huge with religious seperatists like Quakers, Diggers, and Levellers, as they try to get an edge over entrenched institutions. So, when Hill says that Winstanley says that it's a shame that mechanical men (or, uneducated laborers and preachers) and specialized academics never got together to revolutionize university teachings, he's largely talking about a university structure that never really changes from the early middle ages until right now.
Instead, what we see is Walwyn discussing the cultural power of the academy, which feeds into the church. But as society becomes inevitably secularlized (which ends up happening because giving equal access to scriptural literature dilutes the elite nature of being able to speak on scripture as a proscription for societal behavior), we simply cut out the church and rely on the difficulty of access to formal education as a buy in to civil influence.
Actually, the stuff I've been reading for 506 has been on my mind from the perspective of Mage: the Awakening. I've been doing my writing on William Walwyn, a religious and medical writer who wrote on behalf of religious seperatists and was accused of being a "Leveller," or a religious political group who wanted to remove distinctions of social heirarchy. Along with other writers like Gerrard Winstanley, he advocated for religious tolerance and was often accused of communism and promoting anarchy. (Ah yes, the 17th century red scare.)
I'm analyzing his rhetorical construction of the university in his essay, "The Compassionate Samaritan". His writing seems to hold formal academics in disdain or considers them to be unimportant while, simultaniously, he says that their training in rhetoric and theology allows them to talk circles around critics. I mean, it seems like he's being inconsistant and would could chalk it up to being disingenuous, but he's really not.
First, you have to realize that his approach to civil heirarchy is one of skepticism, but he never really advocates for a dissolution of government. Not only are there indications I cite in "Samaritan" itself, but he writes both anonymously and under his own name (imprisoned from the Tower of London, no less) of the need for certain governmental powers to promote a peaceful nation. So, you know, he's not just bagging on university structure because it's structured - there has to be other reasons. And there are - more than one - so, it's not exactly incredibly complicated, but the desire to condense a complex discussion into a single talking point is always present. Instead, he's critical of the idea that university training has an essential or even divine nature that elevates it above lay discussion. He's also critical of this use of status that comes from being in a social group that implicitly and explicitly supports an unequal power structure. These kind of feed into one another, and it can be difficult to seperate out to the point that we simply need to allow for the issues to blend together.
What becomes interesting, once you're seeing how Walwyn has constructed the university in "Samaritan," is that there's an implicit understanding that the reader is aware of what a university is for. There's actually a split that we'd consider strange between emergent mechanical sciences and theological education, and who backs what. A scholar named Christopher Hill discusses that in depth, but you can also find it in tracts that get run off anywhere in the 1600's. (It's some real Sorcerer's Crusade shit, to be frank.) CoE supporting bishops and academically educated divines support a university structure that focuses on theological education, and so universities are very commonly understood as culturally important but practically useless. There's an explosion of really bad science that's just starting out - attempts at astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, physics, are all very crude. These are not really approved of by the church, as men really aren't supposed to be meddling in the affairs of God. So, they're huge with religious seperatists like Quakers, Diggers, and Levellers, as they try to get an edge over entrenched institutions. So, when Hill says that Winstanley says that it's a shame that mechanical men (or, uneducated laborers and preachers) and specialized academics never got together to revolutionize university teachings, he's largely talking about a university structure that never really changes from the early middle ages until right now.
Instead, what we see is Walwyn discussing the cultural power of the academy, which feeds into the church. But as society becomes inevitably secularlized (which ends up happening because giving equal access to scriptural literature dilutes the elite nature of being able to speak on scripture as a proscription for societal behavior), we simply cut out the church and rely on the difficulty of access to formal education as a buy in to civil influence.