The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts

The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts
Author: Elizabeth Mazzola
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004474285

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance. The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience. The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.

The Pathology of the English Renaissance

The Pathology of the English Renaissance
Author: Elizabeth Mazzola
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004111950

Challenging readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, this work proposes instead that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, and that many ideas outlawed or forgotten by Protestant reformers shared a vital afterlife.

Theatre and Religion

Theatre and Religion
Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719063633

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Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency

Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency
Author: John E. Curran Jr
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317124030

Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism. By rendering a Catholic Prince Hamlet caught in a Protestant world which consistently denies him his aspirations for a noble life, Shakespeare is able in this play, his most theologically engaged, to delineate the differences between the two belief systems, but also to demonstrate the consequences of replacing the old religion so completely with the new.

The Shakespearean International Yearbook

The Shakespearean International Yearbook
Author: Graham Bradshaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135196352X

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture
Author: Christopher Ivic
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2004-07-31
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134388322

This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up an area of study overlooked by contemporary Renaissance scholarship, which is too often swayed by a critical paradigm devoted to the "art of memory." This volume recovers the crucial role of forgetting in producing early modernity's subjective and collective identities, desires and fantasies.

The Shakespearean World

The Shakespearean World
Author: Jill L Levenson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 779
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317696182

The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare’s world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies – such as ecology, tourism, and new media – and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.

The Poetry of Immanence

The Poetry of Immanence
Author: Robert Whalen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802036599

In this extensive study of two of the most celebrated seventeenth-century religious poets, Robert Whalen examines the role of sacrament in the formation of early modern religious subjectivity. For John Donne and George Herbert, sacramental topoi became powerful conceptual tools with which to explore both the intersection of spiritual and material aspects of human experience and their competing claims to Christianity. Whalen's argument builds upon his central idea of 'sacramental Puritanism, ' or the effort to cultivate a Calvinist sense of interiority through a fully ceremonial apparatus, and thereby to reconcile the potentially disparate imperatives of sacrament and devotion. Unique in its combination of current historiography and informed analysis, its attention to the sacramental features of Donne's 'secular' lyrics, and its advancement of sacramental thought as an important element of Renaissance English culture, The Poetry of Immanence illuminates a crucial dimension of the work of two major Stuart writers. In his comprehensive critical readings, Whalen offers a substantial contribution to the increasing study of religious themes and devotion in the literature of the early modern period.

Visions in Late Medieval England

Visions in Late Medieval England
Author: Gwenfair Walters Adams
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004156062

This volume is the first to explore the breadth of vision types in late medieval English lay spirituality. Analyzing 1000+ accounts, it proposes that visions buttressed five core dynamics (relating to purgatory, saints, demons, sacramental faith, and the Church's authority).

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space
Author: Tamsin Badcoe
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526139693

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.