Download or read book The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England written by Alastair Bellany and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-29 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a detailed 2002 study of the political significance of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613.

Download or read book Manuscript Matters written by Lara Crowley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manuscript Matters illuminates responses to some of John Donne's most elusive texts by his contemporary audiences. Since examples of seventeenth-century literary criticism prove somewhat rare and frequently ambiguous, this book emphasizes a critical framework rarely used for exhibiting early readers' exegeses of literary texts: the complete manuscripts containing them. Many literary manuscripts that include poems by Donne and his contemporaries were compiled during their lifetimes, often by members of their circles. For this reason, and because various early modern poems and prose works satirize topical events and prominent figures in highly coded language, attempting to understand early literary interpretations proves challenging but highly valuable. Compilers, scribes, owners, and other readers–men and women who shared in Donne's political, religious, and social contexts–offer clues to their literary responses within a range of features related to the construction and subsequent use of the manuscripts. This study's findings call us to investigate more extensively and systematically how certain early manuscripts were constructed through analysis of such features as scripts, titles, sequence of contents, ascriptions, and variant diction. While such studies can throw light on many early modern texts, exploring artefacts containing Donne's works proves particularly useful because more of his poetry circulated in manuscript than did that of any other early modern poet. Manuscript Matters engages Donne's satiric, lyric, and religious poetry, as well as his prose paradoxes and problems. Analysing his texts within their manuscript contexts enables modern readers to interpret Donne's poetry and prose through an early modern lens.

Download or read book Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti Courtly Love Poetry written by Joshua Eckhardt and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-05-21 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reappraises the work of early-seventeenth-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected: libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his most erotic or obscene poems, such as 'To his Mistress going to bed' and 'The Anagram'. Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics. Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct from that of authors, stationers, and readers. Based on a thorough investigation of manuscript verse miscellanies, the book appeals to scholars and students of early modern English literature and history, Donne studies, manuscript studies, and the history of the book.

Download or read book Unperfect Histories written by Harriet Archer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed exploration of a significant work of Tudor literature, The Mirror for Magistrates. The volume shows how the text is more than a moralistic collection of poems and how it is concerned with the transmission of national history, and the ways in which the past can be distorted, misremembered, misinterpreted, or lost.

Download or read book A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle written by Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women's speeches, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society. The first part of this study investigates the early modern execution, including the behavioral expectations for condemned individuals, the medieval tradition that shaped the ritual, and the gender specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women's executions. Depictions of the female body are the focus of the second part of the book. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. These signs, though, were related not just to early modern ideas about female modesty and weakness, but also to the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behavior to inner spiritual states. While many representations of women focused on physical traits and behaviors coded as godly, other accounts highlighted the grotesque and bestial attributes of women deemed unrepentant or evil. Part Three considers the rhetorical strategies used by women and their authors, highlighting the ways that women positioned themselves as stereotypically weak in order to defuse criticism of their speeches and navigate their positions in society, even when awaiting death on the scaffold. The greater focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects"--

Download or read book Marriage Performance and Politics at the Jacobean Court written by Dr Kevin Curran and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.

Download or read book The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy written by James Doelman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early Stuart funeral elegy was a copious and digressive genre, and exceptional deaths pressed elegists to stretch beyond the usual rhetoric of grief and commemoration. This book engages in a broad reading of the period’s rich trove of funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, and by poets ranging from the canonical to the anonymous. The book stands apart from earlier studies by its greater focus upon the subjects of funeral elegies (rather than the poets), and how the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts affected the poetic response. Individual deaths are understood in relation to each other and other prominent events of the time. While the book covers the period 1603 to 1640, the 1620s stand out as a tumultuous decade in which the genre most fully engaged in matters of political controversy and satire.

Download or read book Reconsidering Biography written by Martine Watson Brownley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Sir John Hawkins's Life of Johnson has long been an essential source for readers interested in Samuel Johnson, for over two hundred years now Hawkins's biography has been systematically misread, misinterpreted, and misunderstood. Reconsidering Biography opens a long-needed critical debate on Hawkins's achievement as a biographer, and in the process argues for important changes in prevailing scholarly views of Hawkins, Johnson, and English biography itself.

Download or read book Sir Walter Raleigh written by Raleigh Trevelyan and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-01-03 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result is the most immediate, detailed, and convincing portrait of one of the most compelling figures in English history."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Family Politics in Early Modern Literature written by Hannah Crawforth and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the ways that family relationships (parental, marital, sibling or other) mimic, and stand in for, political ones in the Early Modern period, and vice versa. Bringing together leading international scholars in literary-historical fields to produce scholarship informed by the perspective of contemporary politics, the volume examines the ways in which the family defines itself in transformative moments of potential crisis – birth and death, maturation, marriage – moments when the family is negotiating its position within and through broader cultural frameworks, and when, as a result, family ‘politics’ become most apparent.

Download or read book Death and Disorder written by Ken MacMillan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Death and Disorder, award-winning teacher Ken MacMillan introduces readers to the tumultuous world of Tudor and Stuart England. During this period, numerous kings and queens were killed, their advisors assassinated, treasonous nobles beheaded, religious heretics burned at the stake, and common criminals executed by hanging. Combined with devastating plagues, a high rate of infant mortality, and violence on the battlefield, these events created an environment of disorder. MacMillan argues that both despite and because of the prevalence of death and disorder in early modern England, these two centuries saw critical historical developments. Each chapter opens with a thematic vignette, closes with an excerpt from a primary source, and includes images and engaging discussion questions. The book also provides a timeline of key events, genealogical charts, and a list of further resources.

Download or read book The Invisible Exchange written by Brian Woolland and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Edgworth is a man on the margins, a trickster on the inside and the outside of society. But this hardened rogue is shaken by his encounters with the occult and challenged by his dealings with four powerful women, each of whom in very different ways forces him into a journey of radical self-discovery.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women s Writing in English 1540 1700 written by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The White Devil written by John Webster and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adultery, intrigue, murder, revenge: the densely-packed plot of The White Devil touches on topics that are representative of the atmosphere of Jacobean tragedy. Part tragedy, part satire of a corrupt political world, the play explores the relations of the powerful to the disempowered; the opportunities and constraints of women trying to survive in a male-dominated society; the complex distribution of social hierarchy by birth, wealth, gender, race; and the way the skills licensed by the theatre itself – including disguise and both the performance and interpretation of character – become crucial survival skills, in a world of hidden motives and concealed intentions. Now comprehensively re-edited, with an introduction that addresses issues of performance, cultural and historical context, and interpretation, exploring the dark energy that has impelled audiences and scholars to return to this play again and again across four centuries. Arden Early Modern Drama editions offer the best in contemporary scholarship, providing a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary and guiding the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the play. This edition provides: A clear and authoritative text Detailed on-page commentary notes A comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, cultural and performance contexts A bibliography of references and further reading ARDEN EARLY MODERN DRAMA General Editors: Suzanne Gossett, John Jowett and Gordon McMullan Visit the Arden website at www.ardenshakespeare.com

Download or read book The English Renaissance written by Kate Aughterson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology collects together primary texts and documents written by Elizabeth Tudor, Machievelli, Edmund Spencer, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Galileo Galilei, James I, Walter Raleigh and Michel Montaigne relevant to the literature, culture and intellectual life in England between 1550 and 1660. Divided into sections, this collection of primary sources covers such topics as religion, politics, society and social life, education, literary and cultural theories, science and magic, gender and sexuality and exploration and trade. --From publisher's description.

Download or read book Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque written by J. Knowles and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.

Download or read book Scepticism and belief in English witchcraft drama 1538 1681 written by Eric Pudney and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Warburg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities for an outstanding work of literary history This is a study of the representation of witches in early modern English drama, organised around the themes of scepticism and belief. It covers the entire early modern period, including the Restoration, and pays particular attention to three plays in which witchcraft is central: The Witch of Edmonton (1621), The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and The Lancashire Witches (1681). Always a controversial issue, witchcraft has traditionally been seen in terms of a debate between ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. This book argues instead that, while the concepts of scepticism and belief are central to an understanding of early modern witchcraft, they are more fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the witchcraft debate, but as rhetorical tools used by both sides.