Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England

Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108910424

Drawing together leading scholars of early modern memory studies and death studies, Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England explores and illuminates the interrelationships of these categories of Renaissance knowing and doing, theory and praxis. The collection features an extended Introduction that establishes the rich vein connecting these two fields of study and investigation. Thereafter, the collection is arranged into three subsections, 'The Arts of Remembering Death', 'Grounding the Remembrance of the Dead', and 'The Ends of Commemoration', where contributors analyse how memory and mortality intersected in writings, devotional practice, and visual culture. The book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, book history, art history, and the history of mnemonics and thanatology, and will prove an indispensable guide for researchers, instructors, and students alike.

Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England

Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108843395

This collection reexamines commemoration and memorialization as generative practices illuminating the hidden life of Renaissance death arts.

The Death Arts in Renaissance England

The Death Arts in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108800394

The first-ever critical anthology of the death arts in Renaissance England, this book draws together over 60 extracts and 20 illustrations to establish and analyse how people grappled with mortality in the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as providing a comprehensive resource of annotated and modernized excerpts, this engaging study includes commentary on authors and overall texts, discussions of how each excerpt is constitutive and expressive of the death arts, and suggestions for further reading. The extended Introduction takes into account death's intersections with print, gender, sex, and race, surveying the period's far-reaching preoccupation with, and anticipatory reflection upon, the cessation of life. For researchers, instructors, and students interested in medieval and early modern history and literature, the Reformation, memory studies, book history, and print culture, this indispensable resource provides at once an entry point into the field of early modern death studies and a springboard for further research.

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316495418

This is the first critical anthology of writings about memory in Renaissance England. Drawing together excerpts from more than seventy writers, poets, physicians, philosophers and preachers, and with over twenty illustrations, the anthology offers the reader a guided exploration of the arts of memory. The introduction outlines the context for the tradition of the memory arts from classical times to the Renaissance and is followed by extracts from writers on the art of memory in general, then by thematically arranged sections on rhetoric and poetry, education and science, history and philosophy, religion, and literature, featuring texts from canonical, non-canonical and little-known sources. Each excerpt is supported with notes about the author and about the text's relationship to the memory arts, and includes suggestions for further reading. The book will appeal to students of the memory arts, Renaissance literature, the history of ideas, book history and art history.

Issues of Death

Issues of Death
Author: Michael Neill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 419
Release: 1997
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0198183860

Issues of Death offers a fresh approach to the tragic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Starting from the premise that "death" is a historical construct that is differently experienced in every culture, it treats Renaissance tragedy as an instrument for reimagining the human encounter with death. Analyses of major plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, and Ford explore the relation of tragedy to the macabre tradition, to the apocalyptic displays of the anatomy theatre, and to the spectacular arts of funeral.

Mapping Mortality

Mapping Mortality
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780870239984

This book is a cultural study of the ways men and women in early modern England confronted, accommodated, and paid tribute to mortal life and certain death. Drawing on prose and poetry, painting and statuary, social practices and religious rites, William Engel reopens central questions about Renaissance habits of thought. He explores how the metaphorics of that period signaled and enacted a continual revelation of mortality: the death of the body (figured as a kind of vehicle) and the eternality of the soul (that which was to be transported). Engel argues that early modern metaphorics was essentially mnemonic and emblematic, grounding itself in the relation of body and soul. Building on the work of Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Eliade, the book provides contemporary readers with a key for recovering and understanding the critical assumptions underlying a mnemonically oriented principle of aesthetics.

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England

The Memory Arts in Renaissance England
Author: William E. Engel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2016-08-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107086817

Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.

Memories of War in Early Modern England

Memories of War in Early Modern England
Author: Susan Harlan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137580127

This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.