Early Modern Civil Discourses

Early Modern Civil Discourses
Author: J. Richards
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2003-09-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230505066

This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scots - among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles - by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives 'civil' and 'barbarous' in cultural and colonial encounters.

By Nature and by Custom Cursed

By Nature and by Custom Cursed
Author: Phillip H. Round
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780874519297

A major reexamination of New England's cultural society, in which Puritans share the stage with many other discourses.

Gender Matters

Gender Matters
Author: Mara R. Wade
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2013-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401210233

Gender Matters opens the debate concerning violence in literature and the arts beyond a single national tradition and engages with multivalent aspects of both female and male gender constructs, mapping them onto depictions of violence. By defining a tight thematic focus and yet offering a broad disciplinary scope for inquiry, the present volume brings together a wide range of scholarly papers investigating a cohesive topic—gendered violence—from the perspectives of French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and Japanese literature, history, musicology, art history, and cultural studies. It interrogates the intersection of gender and violence in the early modern period, cutting across national traditions, genres, media, and disciplines. By engaging several levels of discourse, the volume advances a holistic approach to understanding gendered violence in the early modern world. The convergence of discourses concerning literature, the arts, emerging print technologies, social and legal norms, and textual and visual practices leverages a more complex understanding of gender in this period. Through the unifying lens of gender and violence the contributions to this volume comprehensively address a wide scope of diverse issues, approaches, and geographies from late medieval Japan to the European Enlightenment. While the majority of essays focus on early modern Europe, they are broadly contextualized and informed by integrated critical approaches pertaining to issues of violence and gender.

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690
Author: James Daybell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134771916

Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 is the first collection to examine the gendered nature of women’s letter-writing in England and Ireland from the late-fifteenth century through to the Restoration. The essays collected here represent an important body of new work by a group of international scholars who together look to reorient the study of women’s letters in the contexts of early modern culture. The volume builds upon recent approaches to the letter, both rhetorical and material, that have the power to transform the ways in which we understand, study and situate early modern women’s letter-writing, challenging misconceptions of women’s letters as intrinsically private, domestic and apolitical. The essays in the volume embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches: historical, literary, palaeographic, linguistic, material and gender-based. Contributors deal with a variety of issues related to early modern women’s correspondence in England and Ireland. These include women’s rhetorical and persuasive skills and the importance of gendered epistolary strategies; gender and the materiality of the letter as a physical form; female agency, education, knowledge and power; epistolary networks and communication technologies. In this volume, the study of women’s letters is not confined to writings by women; contributors here examine not only the collaborative nature of some letter-writing but also explore how men addressed women in their correspondence as well as some rich examples of how women were constructed in and through the letters of men. As a whole, the book stands as a valuable reassessment of the complex gendered nature of early modern women’s correspondence.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
Author: R. Adams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2010-12-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230298125

Offering a fresh approach to the study of the figure of the diplomat in the early modern period, this collection of diverse readings of archival texts, objects and contexts contributes a new analysis of the spaces, activities and practices of the Renaissance embassy.

John Lyly and early modern authorship

John Lyly and early modern authorship
Author: Andy Kesson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526101858

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time. Kesson traces Lyly's work in prose fiction and the theatre, demonstrating previously unrecognised connections between these two forms of entertainment. The final chapter examines how his importance to early modern authorship came to be forgotten in the late seventeenth century and thereafter. This book serves as an introduction to Lyly and early modern literature for students, but its argument for the central importance of Lyly himself and 1580s literary culture makes it a significant contribution to current scholarly debate. Its investigation of the relationship between performance and print means that it will be of interest to those who care about, watch or work in early modern performance.

The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England

The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England
Author: John F. McDiarmid
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317023838

With its challenging, paradoxical thesis that Elizabethan England was a 'republic which happened also to be a monarchy', Patrick Collinson's 1987 essay 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I' instigated a proliferation of research and lively debate about quasi-republican aspects of Tudor and Stuart England. In this volume, a distinguished international group of scholars examines the idea of the 'monarchical republic' from the 1530s to the 1640s, and tests the concept from a variety of points of view. New suggestions are advanced about the pattern of development of quasi-republican tendencies and of opposition to them, and about their relation to the politics of earlier and later periods. A number of essays focus on the political activity of leading figures at court; several analyse political life in towns or rural areas; others discuss education, rhetoric, linguistic thought and reading practices, poetic and dramatic texts, the relations of politics to religious conflict, gendered conceptions of the monarchy, and 'monarchical republicanism' in the new American colonies. Differing positions in the scholarly debate about early modern English republicanism are represented, and fresh archival research advances the study of quasi-republican elements in early modern English politics.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought

Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought
Author: David Armitage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139480421

This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare's works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare's writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare's distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought.

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England
Author: Katherine R. Larson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-08-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0192581937

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700
Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192604732

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.