Originally published 1660 | ||
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. 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.
Contents
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. 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.
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. 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.
Content
The book was conceived as instructive, on the theme of the ascent of the soul. 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. The character Antitheus is portrayed negatively as a Hobbesian in the Interregnum sense.