Shakespeare's Binding Language

Shakespeare's Binding Language
Author: John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 635
Release: 2016-03-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191074853

This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges, and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama. Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on Shakespeare's plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How do oaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.

The Devil's Details

The Devil's Details
Author: Chuck Zerby
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2007-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1416587330

Footnotes have not had it easy. Their dominance of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literature and scholarship was both hard-won -- following many years of struggle -- and doomed, as it led to belittlement in the twentieth century. In The Devil's Details, Chuck Zerby playfully explores footnotes' long and illustrious history and makes a clarion call to save them from the new world of the Internet and hypertext. In a story that boasts a marvelous plot and a rogues' gallery of players, Zerby examines traditional footnotes and their less-buttoned-down incarnations, as when used by pornographers. Yes, The Devil's Details is full of surprises: Zerby hunts down the first bona fide fully functioning footnote; unearths a multivolume history of Northumberland County, England, that uses one volume for a single footnote; and uncovers a murder plot. He even explains why footnotes are like blind dates. Carefully researched and highly opinionated, The Devil's Details affirms that delight in reading can come from unexpected places.

Lest We be Damned

Lest We be Damned
Author: Lisa McClain
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780415967907

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640

The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640
Author: A.F. Allison
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 135196397X

This is an annotated bibliography of Catholic books in English printed abroad or secretly in England at a time when Catholic printing was prohibited in England and such books, when discovered by the authorities, were seized and destroyed. It includes all the 930 items listed in the authors' A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English..., 1956 (A&R) except for a handful which, for reasons of consistency, were described in volume I of the present work (Scolar Press, 1989), and it adds a further twenty-five on which information has come to light more recently. The annotations, historical, literary and bibliographical, are very much fuller than those in A&R and include a vast amount of evidence now brought together for the first time. The true authors of many anonymous and pseudonymous books are identified and many books issued with a false imprint, or no imprint at all, are assigned to particular presses. In each entry, up to fifteen locations are given where known. A concordance links the entries with those in A&R to facilitate cross-reference from one to the other, and indexes of titles, printers and publishers, and persons (including foreign authors) mentioned in the text are provided. The volume concludes with a short list of Addenda and Corrigenda to volume I.

Suspicious Moderate

Suspicious Moderate
Author: Anne Ashley Davenport
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 684
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0268101000

The historiography of English Catholicism has grown enormously in the last generation, led by scholars such as Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Stefania Tutino, and others. In Suspicious Moderate, Anne Ashley Davenport makes a significant contribution to that literature by presenting a long overdue intellectual biography of the influential English Catholic theologian Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680). Born into a Protestant family in Coventry at the end of the sixteenth century, Sancta Clara joined the Franciscan order in 1617. He played key roles in reviving the English Franciscan province and in the efforts that were sponsored by Charles I to reunite the Church of England with Rome. In his voluminous Latin writings, he defended moderate Anglican doctrines, championed the separation of church and state, and called for state protection of freedom of conscience. Suspicious Moderate offers the first detailed analysis of Sancta Clara's works. In addition to his notorious Deus, natura, gratia (1634), Sancta Clara wrote a comprehensive defense of episcopacy (1640), a monumental treatise on ecumenical councils (1649), and a treatise on natural philosophy and miracles (1662). By carefully examining the context of Sancta Clara's ideas, Davenport argues that he aimed at educating English Roman Catholics into a depoliticized and capacious Catholicism suited to personal moral reasoning in a pluralistic world. In the course of her research, Davenport also discovered that "Philip Scot," the author of the earliest English discussions of Hobbes (a treatise published in 1650), was none other than Sancta Clara. Davenport demonstrates how Sancta Clara joined the effort to fight Hobbes's Erastianism by carefully reflecting on Hobbes's pioneering ideas and by attempting to find common ground with him, no matter how slight.

The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez

The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez
Author: Benjamin Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191629197

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suárez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age. He was the last great Scholastic thinker and profoundly influenced the thought of his contemporaries within both Catholic and Protestant circles. Suárez contributed to all fields of philosophy, from natural law, ethics, and political theory to natural philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology, and—most importantly—to metaphysics, and natural theology. Echoes of his thinking reverberate through the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and beyond. Yet curiously Suárez has not been studied in detail by historians of philosophy. It is only recently that he has emerged as a significant subject of critical and historical investigation for historians of late medieval and early modern philosophy. Only in recent years have small sections of Suárez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suárez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez is one of the first collections in English written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suárez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suárez for years to come—as well as the history of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suárez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317169239

The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead

Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead
Author: Michael C. Questier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521652605

This volume contains a series of Jacobean newsletters written by members of one of the most important Catholic clerical factions of the period. They shed light primarily on matters which most immediately affected the English Catholic community: the strife between different Catholic factions, the conflict between Catholics and the State (especially over the Jacobean oath of allegiance), and the possibility, nevertheless, of obtaining some form of toleration. They also give us Catholic glosses on other news which could be taken to have a bearing on the prospects of English Catholics, such as Court politics, the conduct of Jacobean foreign policy towards European Catholic states, and controversies within the Church of England. This previously unpublished material, extensively annotated by Michael Questier, provides highly illuminating source material for the study of early modern ecclesiastical politics.