Download or read book Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage written by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse t

Download or read book The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Download or read book Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Dr Elizabeth Williamson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

Download or read book Bad Humor written by Kimberly Anne Coles and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, in the early modern period, is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. In Bad Humor, Kimberly Anne Coles charts how these concerns converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion written by Stephen Wittek and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a close look at Shakespeare’s engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. For playhouse audiences during the period, conversional thought encompassed a markedly diverse, fluid amalgamation of ideas, practices, and arguments centered on the means by which an individual could move from one category of identity to another. In an analysis that includes chapter-length readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, the book argues that Shakespearean drama made a unique and substantive intervention in public discourse surrounding conversion, and continues to speak meaningfully about conversional experience for audiences in the present age. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars with an interest in theatrical history, performance theory, theology, cultural studies, race studies, and gender studies.

Download or read book Barbarous Antiquity written by Miriam Jacobson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late sixteenth century, English merchants and diplomats ventured into the eastern Mediterranean to trade directly with the Turks, the keepers of an important emerging empire in the Western Hemisphere, and these initial exchanges had a profound effect on English literature. While the theater investigated representations of religious and ethnic identity in its portrayals of Turks and Muslims, poetry, Miriam Jacobson argues, explored East-West exchanges primarily through language and the material text. Just as English markets were flooded with exotic goods, so was the English language awash in freshly imported words describing items such as sugar, jewels, plants, spices, paints, and dyes, as well as technological advancements such as the use of Arabic numerals in arithmetic and the concept of zero. Even as these Eastern words and imports found their way into English poetry, poets wrestled with paying homage to classical authors and styles. In Barbarous Antiquity, Jacobson reveals how poems adapted from Latin or Greek sources and set in the ancient classical world were now reoriented to reflect a contemporary, mercantile Ottoman landscape. As Renaissance English writers including Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and Chapman weighed their reliance on classical poetic models against contemporary cultural exchanges, a new form of poetry developed, positioned at the crossroads of East and West, ancient and modern. Building each chapter around the intersection of an Eastern import and a classical model, Jacobson shows how Renaissance English poetry not only reconstructed the classical past but offered a critique of that very enterprise with a new set of words and metaphors imported from the East.

Download or read book Conversions written by Simon Ditchfield and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Download or read book The Equality of Flesh written by Brent Dawson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-15 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some—like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton—challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others—like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac—offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

Download or read book Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean written by Mario Klarer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean explores the early modern genre of European Barbary Coast captivity narratives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, the Mediterranean Sea was the setting of large-scale corsairing that resulted in the capture or enslavement of Europeans and Americans by North African pirates, as well as of North Africans by European forces, turning the Barbary Coast into the nemesis of any who went to sea. Through a variety of specifically selected narrative case studies, this book displays the blend of both authentic eye witness accounts and literary fictions that emerged against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea. A wide range of other primary sources, from letters to ransom lists and newspaper articles to scientific texts, highlights the impact of piracy and captivity across key European regions, including France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Scandinavia, and Britain, as well as the United States and North Africa. Divided into four parts and offering a variety of national and cultural vantage points, Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean addresses both the background from which captivity narratives were born and the narratives themselves. It is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern slavery and piracy.

Download or read book Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama written by M. Matei-Chesnoiu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Download or read book The Turn of the Soul written by Lieke Stelling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing issues, the present book offers a comprehensive reading of artistic and literary ways in which spiritual transformations and exchanges of religious identities were given meaning.

Download or read book A New Companion to Renaissance Drama written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Companion to Renaissance Drama provides an invaluable summary of past and present scholarship surrounding the most popular and influential literary form of its time. Original interpretations from leading scholars set the scene for important paths of future inquiry. A colorful, comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the material conditions of Renaissance plays, England's most important dramatic period Contributors are both established and emerging scholars, with many leading international figures in the discipline Offers a unique approach by organizing the chapters by cultural context, theatre history, genre studies, theoretical applications, and material studies Chapters address newest departures and future directions for Renaissance drama scholarship Arthur Kinney is a world-renowned figure in the field

Download or read book Religions in Shakespeare s Writings written by David V. Urban and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a wide range of scholarly perspectives, Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings explores Shakespeare’s depictions, throughout his canon, of various religions and matters related to them. This collection’s fifteen essays explore matters pertaining to Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Christianity, the Albigensian heresy of the high middle ages, Islam, Judaism, Roman religion, different manifestations of religious paganism, and even the “religion of Shakespeare” practiced by Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century admirers. These essays analyze how Shakespeare depicts both tensions between religions and the syntheses of different religious expressions on topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s varied portrayals of the afterlife, religious experience in Measure for Measure, and Black natural law and The Tempest. This collection also explores the political ramifications of religion within Shakespeare’s works, as well as Shakespeare’s multifaceted uses of the Bible. Additionally, while this collection does not present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed uniformly throughout his canon, various essays consider to what extent Shakespeare’s individual works demonstrate a Christian foundation. Contributors include John D. Cox, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Grace Tiffany, Matthew J. Smith, Bethany C. Besteman, Sarah Skwire, Feisal Mohamed, Benedict J. Whalen, Benjamin Lockerd, Bryan Adams Hampton, Debra Johanyak, John E. Curran, Emily E. Stelzer, David V. Urban, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race written by Patricia Akhimie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents current scholarship on race and racism in Shakespeare's works. The Handbook offers an overview of approaches used in early modern critical race studies through fresh readings of the plays; an exploration of new methodologies and archives; and sustained engagement with race in contemporary performance, adaptation, and activism.

Download or read book Shakespeare on Salvation written by David Anonby and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge book explores Shakespeare’s negotiation of Reformation controversy about theories of salvation. While twentieth century literary criticism tended to regard Shakespeare as a harbinger of secularism, the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies has given renewed attention to the religious elements in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there remains an aura of uncertainty regarding some of the doctrinal and liturgical specificities of the period. This historical gap is especially felt with respect to theories of salvation, or soteriology. Such ambiguity, however, calls for further inquiry into historical theology. The author explores how the language and concepts of faith, grace, charity, the sacraments, election, free will, justification, sanctification, and atonement find expression in Shakespeare’s plays. In doing so, this book contributes to the recovery of a greater understanding of the relationship between early modern religion and Shakespearean drama. While the author shares David Scott Kastan’s reluctance to attribute particular religious convictions to Shakespeare, in some cases such critical guardedness has diverted attention from the religious topography of Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout this study, the author’s hermeneutic is to read Shakespeare through the lens of early modern theological controversy and to read early modern theology through the lens of Shakespeare.

Download or read book Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England written by S. P. Cerasano and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committed to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eleven new articles and reviews of twelve books.