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In Constant Minds, Adriana McCrea examines the writings of the Flemish philologist Justus Lipsius and the ways in which his philosophy of 'constancy' in political action informed the thought of five English thinkers writing in the humanist tradition: Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, and Joseph Hall. The Lipsian paradigm, as she describes it, addresses several central preoccupations of early-modern Englishmen, including political participation, the disjunction between private and public virtue, and the lessons of history. In this study, McCrea illustrates how Lipsius used Tacitus (historian of imperial Rome, whose works Lipsius translated) to transcend the neo-stoical philosophy of political disengagement by defining the role of prudence in adapting virtue to prevailing political circumstances. The Lipsian paradigm emerged, she argues, from the humanist belief that participation in scholarship and literary texts constituted active service to the state rather than contemplative and scholarship constituted service within the vita activa.
McCrea delineates the Lipsian paradigm within the context of a continental war which threatened to efface the humanist tradition, and which, McCrea argues, inspired Lipsius to...