Download or read book Poison s Dark Works in Renaissance England written by Miranda Wilson and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England considers the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of poisoning prompt new models for understanding the world even as the fictive qualities of poisoning frustrate attempts at certainty. Whether English writers invoke literal poisons, as they do in so many revenge dramas, homicide cases, and medical documents, or whether poisoning appears more metaphorically, as it does in a host of theological, legal, philosophical, popular, and literary works, this particular, “invisible” weapon easily comes to embody the darkest elements of a more general English appetite for imagining the hidden correlations between the seen and the unseen. This book is an inherently interdisciplinary project. This book works from the premise that accounts of poisons and their operations in Renaissance texts are neither incidental nor purely sensational; rather, they do moral, political, and religious work which can best be assessed when we consider poisoning as part of the texture of Renaissance culture. Placing little known or less-studied texts (medical reports, legal accounts, or anonymous pamphlets) alongside those most familiar to scholars and the larger public (such as poetry by Edmund Spenser and plays by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) allows us to appreciate the almost gravitational pull exerted by the notion of poison in the Renaissance. Considering a variety of texts, written for disparate audiences, and with diverse purposes, makes apparent the ways this crime functions as both a local problem to be solved and as an apt metaphor for the complications of epistemology.

Download or read book Poison on the early modern English stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Download or read book Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens written by Carole Levin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens is a lively and erudite collection, unusual in an especially appealing way. This collection of essays shows how queens were represented in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through primary accounts, chronicles, and literary representations. The book also contains modern poetry and short plays about these same queens, allowing readers to understand and appreciate them both intellectually and emotionally. Contributors study a wide range of queens including such famous and fascinating women as Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Hecuba, the Empress Matilda, Mary Stuart, Margaret of Anjou, Catherine of Aragon, and the pirate queen Grace O'Malley. By pairing scholarly essays with contemporary poems about them, the collection demonstrates the continued relevance and immediacy of these powerful and fascinating women.

Download or read book It All Depends on the Dose written by Ole Peter Grell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book City of Light City of Poison Murder Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris written by Holly Tucker and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tucker writes with gusto . . . high drama.”—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review In the late 1600s, Louis XIV assigns Nicolas de la Reynie to bring order to Paris after the brutal deaths of two magistrates. Reynie, pragmatic and fearless, discovers a network of witches, poisoners, and priests whose reach extends all the way to the king’s court at Versailles. Based on court transcripts and Reynie’s compulsive note-taking, Holly Tucker’s engrossing true-crime narrative makes the characters breathe on the page as she follows the police chief into the dark labyrinths of crime-ridden Paris, the halls of royal palaces, secret courtrooms, and torture chambers.

Download or read book Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison written by Sylvia A. Pamboukian and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-12 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie’s female poisoners in the context of Christie’s own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws – witches and poisoners – offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie’s outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

Download or read book Massinger s Italy written by Cristina Paravano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period. This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger’s engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger’s Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger’s plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Download or read book Fatal Fictions written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Download or read book The Poison Trials written by Alisha Rankin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

Download or read book Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries written by Domenico Lovascio and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Download or read book Family and Feuding at the Court of James I written by Johanna Luthman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 1618, Anne Cecil (nee Lake), Lady Roos, accused Frances Cecil, countess of Exeter, of having committed adultery and incest with her husband, the countess's step grandson, William Cecil, Lord Roos. The countess had attempted to poison her twice, first with a poisoned enema, and later with a poisoned syrup of roses. With the help of the countess, Lord Roos secretively fled England for Catholic Italy, leaving his wife and family behind. Now, the murderous countess was again planning to poison Lady Roos, and perhaps also her father, Sir Thomas Lake, the king's Secretary of State. The countess vehemently denied these sensational charges, fell on her knees before the king, and asked for justice and restoration of her damaged honour. The accusations and the countess's defence quickly became a public scandal. The king and council investigated and ordered the matter be solved in the Court of Star Chamber. The Lake and Cecil families promptly sued and counter-sued each other for slander. The trials attracted much attention, not least because Lake's position as Secretary hung in the balance, and because King James decided to emulate the Biblical King Solomon and sit as a judge himself. While the feud and entangled scandals make for sensational reading, they also offer unexplored windows into the culture, society, and politics of Jacobean England. These were events with resounding reverberations and profound impacts on the Jacobean court, involving both its domestic and foreign spheres. Here Johanna Luthman scrutinises the scandals in detail for the first time. Employing a diverse range of methodologies and critical lenses, including those from the history of medicine and gender, and an analysis of several court cases that have not yet been studied, Luthman demonstrates the importance of incorporating the history of these scandals into an understanding of complex and fraught world of the court of King James VI. In so doing, the book offers new perspectives from which to understand the period, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in Jacobean history, as well as the history of gender, family, medicine, and scandal more generally.

Download or read book Literature and Emotion written by Patrick Colm Hogan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and Emotion not only provides a defining overview of the field but also engages with emerging trends. Answering key questions such as ‘What is emotion?’ and ‘Why emotion and literature today?,’ Patrick Colm Hogan presents a clear and accessible introduction to this exciting topic. Readers should come away from the book with a systematic understanding of recent research on and theorization of emotion, knowledge of the way affective science has impacted literary study, and a sense of how to apply that understanding and knowledge to literary works.

Download or read book Spectacular Science Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare written by Sophie Chiari and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can multicultural governance respond to our increasingly complex migratory world?

Download or read book Portraits in Early Modern English Drama written by Emanuel Stelzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues. Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women’s portraits in a theatre without actresses? This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Download or read book Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain written by Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors tackle subjects and disciplines as diverse as alchemy, optics, astronomy, acoustics, geometry, mechanics, and mathematics to reveal how theatre could be used to deploy scientific knowledge. While Science on Stage contributes to cultural and performance studies it also engages with issues of censorship, the effect of the Spanish Inquisition on the circulation of ideas, and the influence of the Eastern traditions in Spain.

Download or read book Plagues poisons and potions written by William G. Naphy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plagues, poisons and potions highlights one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of early modern plague. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries outbreaks of plague in and around the ancient Duchy of Savoy led to the arrests of many people who were accused of conspiring to spread the disease. Those implicated in the conspiracies were usually poor female migrants working in the plague hospitals under the direction of educated professional male barber-surgeons. These 'conspirators' were subsequently tried for spreading plague among leading and wealthy people from urban areas so that they could rob them while the afflicted homeowners were confined to their beds. In order to understand how this phenomenon developed and was regarded at the time, this study examines the courts, the judiciary and the part played by torture in the trials, which frequently concluded with the spectacular and gruesome execution of the suspects. The author goes on to consider the socio-economic conditions of the workers and in doing so highlights an early modern form of 'class warfare'. However, what makes this phenomenon especially interesting is that in an age dominated by superstition, religious strife and witch-hunts, the conspiracies were always given a moe rational explanation and motivation – profit. Both teachers and students of early modern history will be fascinated by this enlightening study into the fears of European society, the spread of the disease and the judicial procedures of the time.

Download or read book World Literature as Discovery written by Zhang Longxi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of world literature is the most noticeable phenomenon in literary studies in the twenty-first century. However, truly well-known and globally circulating works are all canonical works of European or Western literature, while non-European and even "minor" European literatures remain largely unknown beyond their culture of origin. World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon argues that world literature for our time must go beyond Eurocentrism and expand the canon to include great works from non-European and "minor" European literatures. As much of the world’s literature remains untranslated and unknown, the expansion will be an exciting process of discovery. By discussing fundamental questions around canon, circulation, aesthetic values, translation, cosmopolitanism, and the literary universal, Zhang Longxi proposes a new and liberating concept of world literature that will shape world literature worthy of its name. This book speaks for a more inclusive idea of world literature and shows students and scholars alike that all the literary traditions, particularly non-European traditions, will be able to make important contributions and expand the canon of world literature.