Reading the Skies

Reading the Skies
Author: Vladimir Jankovic
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2001-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226392165

From the time of Aristotle until the late eighteenth century, meteorology meant the study of "meteors"—spectacular objects in the skies beneath the moon, which included everything from shooting stars to hailstorms. In Reading the Skies, Vladimir Jankovic traces the history of this meteorological tradition in Enlightenment Britain, examining its scientific and cultural significance. Jankovic interweaves classical traditions, folk/popular beliefs and practices, and the increasingly quantitative approaches of urban university men to understanding the wonders of the skies. He places special emphasis on the role that detailed meteorological observations played in natural history and chorography, or local geography; in religious and political debates; and in agriculture. Drawing on a number of archival sources, including correspondence and weather diaries, as well as contemporary pamphlets, tracts, and other printed sources reporting prodigious phenomena in the skies, this book will interest historians of science, Britain, and the environment.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher:
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198846568

The way that characters in early modern theatrical performance think through their surroundings is important in our understanding of perception, memory, and other forms of embodied affective thought. This book explores this concept in dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson.

The Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus

The Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus
Author: Anna Faktorovich
Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2023-05-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1681145588

The first accurate quantitative re-attribution of all central texts of the British Renaissance. Describes and applies the first unbiased and accurate method of computational-linguistics authorial-attribution. Covers 303 texts with 8,106,059 words, 123 authorial bylines, a range of genres, and a timespan between 1510 and 1662. Includes helpful diagrams that visually show the quantitative-matches and the identical most-frequent phrases between the texts in each linguistic-signature-group. Detailed chronologies for each of the six ghostwriters and the bylines they wrote under, including their dates of birth, death, publications, and other biographical markers that explain why each of them was the only logical attribution. A full bibliography of the 303 tested texts. All of the raw and processed data, not only in summary-tables inside of the book, but also in-full on a publicly-accessible website: https://github.com/faktorovich/Attribution. One table includes all of the data from the first-edition title-pages (byline, printer, bookseller, date, proverbs), and the first-performance (date, troupe). A table on structural elements across all “Shakespeare”-bylined texts summarizes their plot-movements, character-types, settings, slang-usage, primary sources, and poetic design (percentage of rhyme and hendiadys). To explain why these are the first truly accurate re-attributions, numerous reasons for discrediting previous attribution claims are provided throughout. Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus describes a newly invented for this study computational-linguistics authorial-attribution method and applies it and several other approaches to the central texts of the British Renaissance. All of the attribution steps are described precisely to give readers replicable instructions on how they can apply them to any text from any period that they are interested in determining an attribution for. This method can be applied to solving criminal linguistic mysteries such as who wrote the Unabomber Manifesto, or theological mysteries such as if any of the Dead Sea Scrolls might have been forged by a modern author. This method is uniquely accurate because it uses 27 different quantitative tests that measure a text’s dimensions and its similarity or divergence to other texts automatically, without the statisticians being able to skew the outcome by altering the experiment’s analytical design. Re-Attribution guides researchers not only on how to perform the basic calculations, but also how to perform the biographical and documentary research to derive who among the potential bylines in a single signature-group is the ghostwriter, while the others are merely ghostwriter-contractors or pseudonyms. Reliable accuracy is achieved by also performing other types of attribution tests to check if these alternative approaches validate or contradict the 27-tests’ findings. Non-quantitative tests discussed include deciphering the hidden implications of contemporary pufferies, as well as comparing structural elements such as characters, plot, and element borrowings. Part II presents a revised version of the history of the birth of the theater in Britain by reviewing forensic accounting evidence in Philip Henslowe’s Diary, and the documented history of homicidal lending practices and government corruption connected with troupes and theaters. Parts III-VIII explain precisely how this series derived that the British Renaissance was ghostwritten by only six linguistic-signatures: Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, Benjamin Jonson, William Byrd and William Percy. The parts on each of these ghostwriters, not only explain how their biographies fit with the timelines of the texts being attributed to them, but also provide various types of evidence that explains their motives for ghostwriting. And Part IX returns for an intricate analysis of a few pseudonyms or ghostwriting-contractors who were uniquely difficult to exclude as potential ghostwriters; in parallel, these chapters question the reasons these individuals would have needed to purchase ghostwriting services. “The complete series on British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization by Anna Faktorovich is a remarkable accomplishment. Based on her own unbiased method of computational-linguistic authorial-attribution, she has critically examined an entire collection of texts, many previously inaccessible and untranslated to modern English. From a variety of distinct factors that have been ignored or unnoticed in the past, she identifies a group of ghost writers behind many miss-attributed Renaissance works. Of particular interest are works traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Dr. Faktorovich is a prolific writer, very well informed in English literature, philology, and literary criticism, and she is clearly thorough and detail-oriented. Her re-attribution and modernization series demonstrates solid scholarship, fresh perspective, and willingness to challenge conventional thought and methodology.” —Midwest Book Review, Lesly F. Massey (December 2021) “I have long had an interest in linguistics and enjoy reading the frequent ‘Who really wrote Shakespeare’s works?’ Therefore, this book was extremely interesting to me… So, my recommendation is that if you have an interest in linguistics and scholarly research you will love this book… Very interesting and well laid out book. *****” —LibraryThing, Early Reviewers, February 2022 Anna Faktorovich, PhD, is an English professor who previously published Rebellion as Genre and Formulas of Popular Fiction. She is also the Director and Founder of Anaphora Literary Press.

Sociable Knowledge

Sociable Knowledge
Author: Elizabeth Yale
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812247817

Sociable Knowledge reconstructs the collaborations of seventeenth-century naturalists who, dispersed across city and country, worked through writing, conversation, and print to convert fragmented knowledge of the hyper-local and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.

Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610

Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610
Author: Janette Dillon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2006-11-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521029902

Explores the vital relationship between city and court in the drama of Shakespeare's time.

English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton

English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton
Author: Valerie Hotchkiss
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0252091531

English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton examines the history of early English books, exploring the concept of putting the English language into print with close study of the texts, the formats, the audiences, and the functions of English books. Lavishly illustrated with more than 130 full-color images of stunning rare books, this volume investigates a full range of issues regarding the dissemination of English language and culture through printed works, including the standardization of typography, grammar, and spelling; the appearance of popular literature; and the development of school grammars and dictionaries. Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson provide engaging descriptions of more than a hundred early English books drawn from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Elizabethan Club of Yale University. The study nearly mirrors the chronological coverage of Pollard and Redgrave's famous Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), beginning with William Caxton, England's first printer, and ending with John Milton, the English language's most eloquent defender of the freedom of the press in his Areopagitica of 1644. William Shakespeare, neither a printer nor a writer much concerned with publishing his own plays, nonetheless deserves his central place in this study because Shakespeare imprints, and Renaissance drama in general, provide a fascinating window on the world of English printing in the period between Caxton and Milton.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance
Author: Katarzyna Lecky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192571753

Katarzyna Lecky explores how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. She explores chapbooks ('cheapbooks') by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton alongside the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era's de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

An age of wonders

An age of wonders
Author: William Burns
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526185660

Monstrous births, rains of blood, apparitions of battles in the sky – people in early modern England found all of these events to carry important religious and political meanings. In An age of wonders, available in paperback for the first time, William E. Burns explores the process by which these events became religiously and politically insignificant in the Restoration period. The story involves the establishment of early modern science, the shift from ‘enthusiastic’ to reasonable religion, and the fierce political combat between the Whigs and the Tories. This historical study is based on close readings of a variety of primary sources, both print and manuscript. Burns claims that prodigies lost their religious meaning and became subjects of scientific enquiry as a result of political struggles, first by the supporters of the restored monarchy and the Church of England against Protestant dissenters, and then by the Whig defenders of the Revolution of 1688 against the Tories and the Jacobites. By integrating religious and political history with the history of science, An age of wonders will be of great use to those working in the field of early modern history.

Historian's Guide to Early British Maps

Historian's Guide to Early British Maps
Author: Helen Wallis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1995-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521551526

Great Britain and Ireland enjoy a rich cartographic heritage, yet historians have not made full use of early maps in their writings and research. This is partly due to a lack of information about exactly which maps are available. With the publication of this volume from the Royal Historical Society, we now have a comprehensive guide to the early maps of Great Britain. The book is divided into two parts: part one describes the history and purpose of maps in a series of short essays on the early mapping of the British Isles; part two comprises a guide to the collections, national and regional. Now available from Cambridge University Press, this volume provides an essential reference tool for anyone requiring to access maps of the British Isles dating back to the medieval period and beyond.