Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books
Columbia University Press A Couple of Soles
Book SynopsisA Couple of Soles is a classic comedic romance by the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu. The first major comedy from late imperial China to appear in English translation, it provides an unparalleled view of the theater in seventeenth-century China.Trade Review[A] masterful translation. . . . Highly recommended. * Choice *A Couple of Soles is an entertaining example of seventeenth century Chinese drama made quite accessible to English-reading audiences. Of both literary and historical interest, and offering quite enjoyable drama, comedy, and romance, it's well worth a look. * Complete Review *Li Yu ranks among China's finest wits, yet none of his ten comedies had been translated into English. This masterful yet accessible rendition of A Couple of Soles makes, at long last, Li Yu's comic genius and theatrical ingenuity visible to students, readers, theater practitioners, and drama scholars around the world. -- Patricia Sieber, The Ohio State UniversityA Couple of Soles displays to the Anglophone world the masterful craft of the Chinese dramatist Li Yu—worthy statesman of the theater, as he was called by admirers. Sustained by extensive commentaries, informative notes, and contemporary wood-block illustrations, this edition by Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel exemplifies the very best of translation-in-research. An excellent addition to the Asian Classics library. -- Vibeke Børdahl, Copenhagen UniversityLi Yu and his work are critical to understanding Chinese theater of his day because he insisted on writing against established conventions and wrote the single most complete guide to playwriting before the end of the imperial period in China. We should all be very grateful to the translators for their effort and care in translating this fascinating example of chuanqi drama. -- David Rolston, University of MichiganThis brilliant book combines excellent scholarship about the innovative seventeenth-century dramatist Li Yu, noted for his unrestrained speech and behavior, with a wonderful translation of one of his comedies. Both translators have established reputations in the field of Chinese drama and literature, which this book will certainly enhance. -- Colin Mackerras, Griffith UniversityAn accessible new translation of an important comic work . . . This translation would be of interest to students of Sinophone studies, dramatic literature, comparative literature, and scholars of Asian performing arts. The play serves as a welcome new resource that could be used in courses on premodern Chinese dramatic literature, comparative literature, and Asian studies, as well as for theatre artists seeking inspiration. * Asian Theatre Journal *A bold and boisterous celebration of theatricality that challenges preconceptions about traditional Chinese theater today with the same panache that it overturned widespread prejudice against actors in the seventeenth century . . . [This translation] inaugurates a host of new possibilities for the study of Chinese theater in the university classroom and beyond, and, with its emphasis on performance, adds considerable diversity to the range of chuanqi available in translation. * Journal of the American Oriental Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNote on the TranslationIntroduction, by Jing ShenDramatis Personae and Their Role CategoriesPreface, by Wang DuanshuScenesA Couple of SolesAppendix: The Playwright and His Art, by Jing ShenNotesBibliography
£58.90
Columbia University Press A Couple of Soles
Book SynopsisA Couple of Soles is a classic comedic romance by the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu. The first major comedy from late imperial China to appear in English translation, it provides an unparalleled view of the theater in seventeenth-century China.Trade Review[A] masterful translation. . . . Highly recommended. * Choice *A Couple of Soles is an entertaining example of seventeenth century Chinese drama made quite accessible to English-reading audiences. Of both literary and historical interest, and offering quite enjoyable drama, comedy, and romance, it's well worth a look. * Complete Review *Li Yu ranks among China's finest wits, yet none of his ten comedies had been translated into English. This masterful yet accessible rendition of A Couple of Soles makes, at long last, Li Yu's comic genius and theatrical ingenuity visible to students, readers, theater practitioners, and drama scholars around the world. -- Patricia Sieber, The Ohio State UniversityA Couple of Soles displays to the Anglophone world the masterful craft of the Chinese dramatist Li Yu—worthy statesman of the theater, as he was called by admirers. Sustained by extensive commentaries, informative notes, and contemporary wood-block illustrations, this edition by Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel exemplifies the very best of translation-in-research. An excellent addition to the Asian Classics library. -- Vibeke Børdahl, Copenhagen UniversityLi Yu and his work are critical to understanding Chinese theater of his day because he insisted on writing against established conventions and wrote the single most complete guide to playwriting before the end of the imperial period in China. We should all be very grateful to the translators for their effort and care in translating this fascinating example of chuanqi drama. -- David Rolston, University of MichiganThis brilliant book combines excellent scholarship about the innovative seventeenth-century dramatist Li Yu, noted for his unrestrained speech and behavior, with a wonderful translation of one of his comedies. Both translators have established reputations in the field of Chinese drama and literature, which this book will certainly enhance. -- Colin Mackerras, Griffith UniversityAn accessible new translation of an important comic work . . . This translation would be of interest to students of Sinophone studies, dramatic literature, comparative literature, and scholars of Asian performing arts. The play serves as a welcome new resource that could be used in courses on premodern Chinese dramatic literature, comparative literature, and Asian studies, as well as for theatre artists seeking inspiration. * Asian Theatre Journal *A bold and boisterous celebration of theatricality that challenges preconceptions about traditional Chinese theater today with the same panache that it overturned widespread prejudice against actors in the seventeenth century . . . [This translation] inaugurates a host of new possibilities for the study of Chinese theater in the university classroom and beyond, and, with its emphasis on performance, adds considerable diversity to the range of chuanqi available in translation. * Journal of the American Oriental Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNote on the TranslationIntroduction, by Jing ShenDramatis Personae and Their Role CategoriesPreface, by Wang DuanshuScenesA Couple of SolesAppendix: The Playwright and His Art, by Jing ShenNotesBibliography
£19.00
Columbia University Press The Substance of Fiction Literary Objects in
Book SynopsisSophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality.Trade ReviewThrough sophisticated and brilliant close reading of selected texts, Sophie Volpp illuminates the significance of objects for early modern Chinese fiction from the point of view of material and visual culture. The Substance of Fiction is a must-read for students in early modern Chinese literature and culture. -- Shang Wei, coeditor of Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and BeyondThis is the most sophisticated engagement to date with the ‘material turn’ in literary studies as it applies to classic Chinese fiction. In its elegant exposition of how fictional objects are not literary instantiations of historical objects, The Substance of Fiction makes a significant intervention in current debates about textuality and materiality. -- Craig Clunas, author of Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644Through a persistent excavation of the rich and often paradoxical meaning of fictional objects, Volpp reveals a previously neglected aspect of the vernacular fiction of late imperial China. She reminds us that far from illustrating reality, fictional objects acquire power and life from engendering unfamiliarity and confusion, thereby fashioning a material world interior to the text. A marvelous book. -- Wu Hung, author of The Full-length Mirror: A Global Visual HistoryThe Substance of Fiction adroitly navigates the material and literary worlds of Ming-Qing China to explore the centrality of things in vernacular writing. Examining new techniques of description and depiction, purposefully designed to question the nature of the “real” world and its unstable reflection in fiction, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on a transformative period. -- Patricia Berger, author of Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing ChinaA pioneering work that firmly brings the study of things into the fold of Chinese literary studies. Volpp’s ability to read literary text with an eye for the material detail is unmatched. Moving through a rich host of late imperial texts, Volpp offers new and startling insights into texts we thought we already knew. -- Paize Keulemans, author of Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination[Volpp's] successful reexamination of canonical literary texts demonstrates the possibility of yielding exciting findings even in frequently discussed fields, not only by engaging in dialogue with previous scholarship but also through meticulous observations guided by new perspectives. -- Wenting Ji * Journal of Chinese History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Substance of Fiction1. The Python Robe of The Plum in the Golden Vase2. Ling Mengchu’s Shell3. Du Shiniang’s Jewel Box4. Li Yu’s Telescope5. The Plate-Glass Mirror in The Story of the Stone6. Historicizing Recession via The Story of the Stone and the JuanqinzhaiConclusion: Literary ObjectsNotesBibliographyIndex
£93.60
Columbia University Press The Substance of Fiction
Book SynopsisSophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality.Trade ReviewThrough sophisticated and brilliant close reading of selected texts, Sophie Volpp illuminates the significance of objects for early modern Chinese fiction from the point of view of material and visual culture. The Substance of Fiction is a must-read for students in early modern Chinese literature and culture. -- Shang Wei, coeditor of Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and BeyondThis is the most sophisticated engagement to date with the ‘material turn’ in literary studies as it applies to classic Chinese fiction. In its elegant exposition of how fictional objects are not literary instantiations of historical objects, The Substance of Fiction makes a significant intervention in current debates about textuality and materiality. -- Craig Clunas, author of Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644Through a persistent excavation of the rich and often paradoxical meaning of fictional objects, Volpp reveals a previously neglected aspect of the vernacular fiction of late imperial China. She reminds us that far from illustrating reality, fictional objects acquire power and life from engendering unfamiliarity and confusion, thereby fashioning a material world interior to the text. A marvelous book. -- Wu Hung, author of The Full-length Mirror: A Global Visual HistoryThe Substance of Fiction adroitly navigates the material and literary worlds of Ming-Qing China to explore the centrality of things in vernacular writing. Examining new techniques of description and depiction, purposefully designed to question the nature of the “real” world and its unstable reflection in fiction, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on a transformative period. -- Patricia Berger, author of Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing ChinaA pioneering work that firmly brings the study of things into the fold of Chinese literary studies. Volpp’s ability to read literary text with an eye for the material detail is unmatched. Moving through a rich host of late imperial texts, Volpp offers new and startling insights into texts we thought we already knew. -- Paize Keulemans, author of Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination[Volpp's] successful reexamination of canonical literary texts demonstrates the possibility of yielding exciting findings even in frequently discussed fields, not only by engaging in dialogue with previous scholarship but also through meticulous observations guided by new perspectives. -- Wenting Ji * Journal of Chinese History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Substance of Fiction1. The Python Robe of The Plum in the Golden Vase2. Ling Mengchu’s Shell3. Du Shiniang’s Jewel Box4. Li Yu’s Telescope5. The Plate-Glass Mirror in The Story of the Stone6. Historicizing Recession via The Story of the Stone and the JuanqinzhaiConclusion: Literary ObjectsNotesBibliographyIndex
£27.00
Columbia University Press On Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the
Book SynopsisMary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements.Trade ReviewMary Wollstonecraft helped us to understand how easily the rights of women can vanish from the political and social scene and how ‘natural’ it can seem for men and women to ignore them. This remarkable book not only situates Wollstonecraft in history but also shows in detail how she altered history by writing so well. -- Michael G. Wood, author of The Habits of DistractionThis book is memorable, educational, and enjoyable, exploring Wollstonecraft’s life and thought with brio and unrestrained pleasure. Wolfson's understanding of the subject is second to none—there is no one more authoritative or more learned. -- Duncan Wu, editor of Romanticism: An AnthologySusan Wolfson’s engaged and engaging account of Mary Wollstonecraft illuminates the creative intellectual energies that drove Wollstonecraft’s prodigious achievement: nothing less than an analysis of women’s situation in the context of a larger political system. Wolfson’s exposition is dazzling. -- Frances Ferguson, author of Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of IndividuationWolfson provides a compelling and classroom-friendly introduction to the troubled private life, flamboyant public career, and charged political afterlife of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her writing is scintillating, with vernacular verve and unflagging narrative drive. This book has everything—point, polish, and an accessibly gripping tale to tell. -- Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of IowaAn admirably witty, informative, and succinct new guide to Wollstonecraft's most famous book. -- Miranda Seymour * New York Review of Books *[An] excellent study of A Vindication. -- Elaine Showalter * Times Literary Supplement *This book provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements. * Discovery *An exciting supplement to the ever-growing list of books on Wollstonecraft and her work...Wolfson’s book works as both an introduction for undergraduate students and an engaging read for feminist and literary scholars. * Tulsa Studies on Women's Literature *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsMy Texts, Abbreviations, and Short TitlesPrologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?1. How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman”2. Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft: The Right Woman3. “An Amazon stept out”: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)4. “Revolution in female manners”: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)5. Dystopian Nightmare: Paris, December 26, 17926. “Bastilled . . . for life”: The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a Fragment (1798)Epilogue: “we hear her voice”Brief Glossary of Recurring NamesNotesFurther Reading and BibliographiesIndex
£42.50
Columbia University Press On Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the
Book SynopsisMary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women’s equality. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements.Trade ReviewMary Wollstonecraft helped us to understand how easily the rights of women can vanish from the political and social scene and how ‘natural’ it can seem for men and women to ignore them. This remarkable book not only situates Wollstonecraft in history but also shows in detail how she altered history by writing so well. -- Michael G. Wood, author of The Habits of DistractionThis book is memorable, educational, and enjoyable, exploring Wollstonecraft’s life and thought with brio and unrestrained pleasure. Wolfson's understanding of the subject is second to none—there is no one more authoritative or more learned. -- Duncan Wu, editor of Romanticism: An AnthologySusan Wolfson’s engaged and engaging account of Mary Wollstonecraft illuminates the creative intellectual energies that drove Wollstonecraft’s prodigious achievement: nothing less than an analysis of women’s situation in the context of a larger political system. Wolfson’s exposition is dazzling. -- Frances Ferguson, author of Solitude and the Sublime: The Romantic Aesthetics of IndividuationWolfson provides a compelling and classroom-friendly introduction to the troubled private life, flamboyant public career, and charged political afterlife of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her writing is scintillating, with vernacular verve and unflagging narrative drive. This book has everything—point, polish, and an accessibly gripping tale to tell. -- Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of IowaAn admirably witty, informative, and succinct new guide to Wollstonecraft's most famous book. -- Miranda Seymour * New York Review of Books *[An] excellent study of A Vindication. -- Elaine Showalter * Times Literary Supplement *This book provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements. * Discovery *An exciting supplement to the ever-growing list of books on Wollstonecraft and her work...Wolfson’s book works as both an introduction for undergraduate students and an engaging read for feminist and literary scholars. * Tulsa Studies on Women's Literature *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsMy Texts, Abbreviations, and Short TitlesPrologue: Why Mary Wollstonecraft? Why A Vindication?1. How Mary Wollstonecraft Became “the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman”2. Picturing Mary Wollstonecraft: The Right Woman3. “An Amazon stept out”: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)4. “revolution in female manners”: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)5. Dystopian Nightmare: Paris, December 26, 17926. “bastilled . . . for life”: The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; a Fragment (1798)Epilogue: “we hear her voice”Brief Glossary of Recurring NamesNotesFurther Reading and BibliographiesIndex
£12.34
Columbia University Press Leibnizing A Philosopher in Motion Columbia
Book SynopsisRichard Halpern argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.Trade ReviewThis engaging and highly original book welcomes the reader into the experience of meeting Leibniz with Richard Halpern as our guide. Proceeding little by little—monad by monad as it were—we go on a journey that is unexpectedly festive, funny, and full of surprises. By carefully selecting themes and passages and providing occasional illustrations from Leibniz’s papers, Halpern has deftly created a dazzling series of windows into the world of Leibniz. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of LifeIn this brilliant and sprightly book, Richard Halpern reinvents the philosopher and polymath G. W. Leibniz for the twenty-first century. For Halpern, Leibniz is both a proto-science fiction writer and a mad tinkerer who invents a perpetual-motion machine. Speculative thought in the manner of Halpern’s Leibniz leads us to continually new insights and offers us continually new occasions of delight. -- Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative RealismRichard Halpern's Leibnizing is a thrilling and original investigation of the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from an angle that will be completely unfamiliar to most philosophers: the angle of style. But the philosophers' Leibniz is a mere shadow of the hot-blooded Leibniz that comes through in Halpern's masterful treatment, which shows that there can be no easy distinction between style and substance. This work both stands apart from the past several centuries of Leibniz scholarship, and at the same time holds the rare promise of renewing this field, and causing us to see the object of our scholarly interest in a fundamentally new way. -- Justin E. H. Smith, coeditor of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the SensesTable of ContentsPreface: Leibniz Among the Disciplines1. Leibniz in Motion2. Tinkering3. How to Read a Leibnizian Sentence4. Metaphorical Clumping5. The Mathematics of Resemblance6. Cognitive Mapping and Blended Spaces7. Chemical Wit8. Perspective9. Expression10. How to Build a Monad11. Monadic Politics12. The Mind-Body Problem13. Microperceptions14. The Je Ne Sais Quoi and the Leibnizian Unconscious15. Mind Is a Liquid16. The Confused and the Distinct17. Philosophy as Aesthetic Object18. Blind Thought19. Dark Leibniz20. Things Fall Apart21. The Monad as Event: Alfred North Whitehead22. The Monad as Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter23. The Godless Monad: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela24. The Quantum Monad: David Bohm25. Afterword: Leibniz in My LatteAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£90.00
Columbia University Press Leibnizing A Philosopher in Motion Columbia
Book SynopsisRichard Halpern argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.Trade ReviewThis engaging and highly original book welcomes the reader into the experience of meeting Leibniz with Richard Halpern as our guide. Proceeding little by little—monad by monad as it were—we go on a journey that is unexpectedly festive, funny, and full of surprises. By carefully selecting themes and passages and providing occasional illustrations from Leibniz’s papers, Halpern has deftly created a dazzling series of windows into the world of Leibniz. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of LifeIn this brilliant and sprightly book, Richard Halpern reinvents the philosopher and polymath G. W. Leibniz for the twenty-first century. For Halpern, Leibniz is both a proto-science fiction writer and a mad tinkerer who invents a perpetual-motion machine. Speculative thought in the manner of Halpern’s Leibniz leads us to continually new insights and offers us continually new occasions of delight. -- Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative RealismRichard Halpern's Leibnizing is a thrilling and original investigation of the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from an angle that will be completely unfamiliar to most philosophers: the angle of style. But the philosophers' Leibniz is a mere shadow of the hot-blooded Leibniz that comes through in Halpern's masterful treatment, which shows that there can be no easy distinction between style and substance. This work both stands apart from the past several centuries of Leibniz scholarship, and at the same time holds the rare promise of renewing this field, and causing us to see the object of our scholarly interest in a fundamentally new way. -- Justin E. H. Smith, coeditor of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the SensesTable of ContentsPreface: Leibniz Among the Disciplines1. Leibniz in Motion2. Tinkering3. How to Read a Leibnizian Sentence4. Metaphorical Clumping5. The Mathematics of Resemblance6. Cognitive Mapping and Blended Spaces7. Chemical Wit8. Perspective9. Expression10. How to Build a Monad11. Monadic Politics12. The Mind-Body Problem13. Microperceptions14. The Je Ne Sais Quoi and the Leibnizian Unconscious15. Mind Is a Liquid16. The Confused and the Distinct17. Philosophy as Aesthetic Object18. Blind Thought19. Dark Leibniz20. Things Fall Apart21. The Monad as Event: Alfred North Whitehead22. The Monad as Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter23. The Godless Monad: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela24. The Quantum Monad: David Bohm25. Afterword: Leibniz in My LatteAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£23.75
University of Illinois Press English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to
Book SynopsisA landmark collection of early English books, with many gorgeous illustrationsTrade Review"English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton is a twice-welcome addition to the book lover's shelves. It provides a succinct and clear introduction to the history of printing in English, including such neglected topics as the interaction between printing and language and the religio-political implications of this seminal technological development. And it introduces to a wider audience the riches of two distinguished collections of early English printed materials."--Milton Gatch, author of The Library of Leander van Ess and the Earliest American Collections of Reformation Pamphlets"We should be grateful to Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson for providing a widely accessible but academically rigorous review of probably the most important period of printing in England. Although there is a grand sweep of two hundred years of history, the individual stories are not ignored, and the authors and printers are brought to light with well-chosen biographical details and vignettes. Many of the books in this catalogue are visually simply delicious, and together they provide a feast to anyone who enjoys books and their history."--Stella Butler, Deputy University Librarian and Associate Director of the John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester"Stimulating from start to finish, enjoyable for the diversity of materials and the strong unity of the presentation, this volume reminds one of precisely why we are attracted to these rare books in the first place: they enliven and invigorate, as much as they record and represent, the distant past immediately before our eyes. As a historian of the book and a curator of rare books and manuscripts, I would not consider my own reference library complete without a copy of English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton."--Earle Havens, author of Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century
£27.90
University of Notre Dame Press Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Book SynopsisThis edition focuses on the Middle English text, with a Modern English Verse translation on facing pages and extensive notes at the bottom of the pages. It discusses the manuscript, the anonymous poet and his other poems, and the structure of the poem and its audience, themes and characterization.Trade Review“Vantuono’s methodology is highly successful, for the pulsating beat and the exuberant spirit of Gawain are recreated in his translation.” —Speculum
£20.69
University of Notre Dame Press Vita nuova
Book SynopsisWritten between 1292 and 1295, the Vita Nuova consists of 31 poems inspired by the historical but idealised and mythologised Lady Beatrice. This bi-lingual edition contains Michael Barbi's 1932 Italian edition plus an English translation.Trade Review“Cervigni and Vasta are to be complimented for their laborious and successful undertaking. This edition will be extremely useful, for it presents us with a version of the Vita nuova that will open up new interpretive and pedagogical avenues.” —Italica“Whatever reputation this translation will gain for its scholarly accomplishments, its excellent overall design, and general ease of use is sure to reclaim a large body of lay readers and experts alike to this lesser known of Dante’s major works.” —Crisis“An important contribution for Dante specialists.” —Library Journal“Students and scholars of Dante and medieval philology will find much to ponder in the material so painstakingly assembled here.” —Choice
£21.84
University of Notre Dame Press Writing Faith and Telling Tales
Book SynopsisThomas More is a complex and controversial figure who has been regarded as both saint and persecutor, leading humanist and a representative of late medieval culture. His religious writings, with their stark and at times violent attacks on what More regarded as heresy, have been hotly debated. In Writing Faith and Telling Tales, Thomas Betteridge sets More''s writings in a broad cultural and chronological context, compares them to important works of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular theology, and makes a compelling argument for the revision of existing histories of Thomas More and his legacy. Betteridge focuses on four areas of More''s writings: politics, philosophy, theology, and devotion. He examines More''s History of King Richard III as a work of both history and political theory. He discusses Utopia and the ways in which its treatment of reason reflects More''s Christian humanism. By exploring three of More''s lesser known works, The SupplTrade Review“In scarcely two hundred pages, Betteridge attempts to weave together several generations of literature, exploring the English writings of Sir Thomas More (as well as the Latin Utopia) through comparison and contrast with over a dozen vernacular authors from the previous two centuries, including Chaucer, Langland, and Skelton. . . . Students of the English authors discussed here will take pleasure in the juxtaposition of familiar texts, while those who have known More through his engagement with Renaissance humanism will find that it enriches and deepens their understanding of the influences behind his work.” —The Medieval Review“Presenting numerous examples of More’s own writings on philosophy, politics, theology, and the practices of affective faith, Betteridge places them alongside theological and literary texts, mostly in the vernacular English, from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to demonstrate their cultural and religious continuity with those medieval works . . . Writing Faith and Telling Tales will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate university libraries, especially those concentrating on late medieval and early Renaissance English literature, and on sixteenth-century English political and ecclesial history.” —Catholic Library World“Writing Faith and Telling Tales argues that the writings of Thomas More should be read as part of ‘a tradition of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century vernacular literature.’ This tradition extends back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but includes other well-known texts such as Piers Plowman, as well as less-studied texts such as Reginald Pecock’s The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. Between a thirty-seven-page introduction and a fourteen-page conclusion, Betteridge offers four thematically organized chapters, respectively entitled ‘Politics,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘Heresy,’ and ‘Devotion.’” —Sixteenth Century Journal“When Betteridge is at his best, his parallels are striking, and readers will be glad to have his suggestive run at More’s telling tales and striking arguments against the early English evangelicals . . . . Betteridge’s careful handling of More’s polemic works will be especially appreciated.” —The Catholic Historical Review“This book covers a vast expanse of English vernacular writing, comparing More to Chaucer and Lydgate, to anti-Lollard tracts and plays such as Everyman, N-Town Play, and the Digby Mary Magdalene, devotional literature . . . . Writing Faith is a valuable addition to scholarship on More, written from a perspective that is rare in recent studies of his work.” —SHARP News“In this fresh, thoughtful, and engaging study, Thomas Betteridge aims to free Thomas More from a weight of scholarship which has tended either to condemn him as a persecutor of heretics or revere him as a saint, and which has judged the significance of his literary output to be its contradictory position somewhere between the binary poles of the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern.’ . . . Writing Faith and Telling Tales is an important and compelling book that not only enhances our understanding of More as an intellectual and writer but of the whole practice and meaning of writing, and not just in late medieval England.” —English Historical Review“The achievements of Writing Faith are considerable. Betteridge has provided a much-needed complement to studies of More that emphasize the Continental aspects of his humanism, and he has also presented us with a version of More as a truly Literary writer, one whose investment in so many different genres derives equally from his varied philosophical commitments and from his abiding interest in storytelling.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Thomas Betteridge’s desire to break down these [humanist writer, Lord Chancellor, and saintly martyr] divides in Writing Faith and Telling Tales is to be fulsomely lauded. . . His analysis of More often reveals intriguing insights, especially as to More’s view of the relationship between truth and fiction.” —Modern Philology“Thomas Betteridge critiques previous assessments of Sir Thomas More . . . as oversimplifying the complexity of More’s medieval heritage. . . . Betteridge reads primary texts closely, finding nuanced relationships between them and More’s work and his complex literary persona.” —Choice“What Betteridge has given us is something remarkably different, something both analytical and speculative that can be thoughtful, inquiring, and at times provocative. It is nothing short of an anatomy of More’s mind that manages to incorporate both the spiritual and the secular as it reaches toward an inclusive poetics of acculturated faith.” —Renaissance Quarterly
£26.99
University of Notre Dame Press Whores of Babylon
Book SynopsisIn Whores of Babylon, Frances E. Dolan offers a perceptive study of the central role that Catholics and Catholicism played in early modern English law, literature, and politics. She contends that despite sharing the same blood, origins, and history as their Protestant antagonists, Catholics provoked more prolific and intemperate visual and verbal representation, and more elaborate and sustained legal regulation, than any other marginal group in seventeenth-century England. This careful and thorough study examines legal and literary representations of the Catholic menace during three crises in Protestant/Catholic relations, from the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to the Popish Plot and Meal Tub Plot (1678-80). It also offers the first sustained analysis of the extent to which gender issues informed both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. Available for the first time in paperback, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern England, Catholic Trade Review“[Dolan] reveals a historical picture that theorizes the interaction between religion, politics, and gender. For scholars who study other religions and time periods, Dolan’s book usefully demonstrates how and why closely-related religious groups deploy gender to mark difference. For specialists in early modern Christianity, Whores of Babylon provides convincing arguments about why Catholic women and (even more surprisingly) the Catholic couple so fascinated pamphleteers, preachers, playwrights, and polemicists as they promoted a white, Protestant, masculine, English national identity.” —Journal of the American Academy of Religion“Whores of Babylon is essential reading for scholars working on the intersections of gender, religion, law, and nationalism in early modern England. Dolan’s scholarship combines meticulous historical research and textual analysis with a sophisticated grasp of theoretical and historiographical questions. Moreover, Dolan’s lucid prose makes her exemplary form of cultural criticism a pleasure to read.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“This is an excellent book, one that painstakingly yet engagingly illuminates the bifurcated social and discursive positions of Catholic women in early modern England.” —Albion“Whores of Babylon is not about religion, as the term has been understood by many scholars who study early modern Catholicism. Religion is not the main concern of this book; religion serves instead mainly to highlight and underline points made about some ways seventeenth-century Englishwomen were valued and employed, used and abused, in print.” —Archivum Historicum
£22.79
University of Notre Dame Press English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution
Book SynopsisTraditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ's suffering and death: the more closely the victim replicates the Christological model, the more legible the martyrdom. But if the textual construction of martyrdom depends on the rehearsal of a paradigmatic story, how do we reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking justification by claims of martyrdom? Observing how martyrdom is constituted through the interplay of historical event and literary form, Alice Dailey explores the development of English martyr literature through the period of intense religious controversy from the heresy executions of Queen Mary to the regicide of 1649. Through close study of texts ranging from late medieval passion drama and hagiography to John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, martyrologies of the Counter-Reformation, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and John Milton's Eikonoklastes, The English Martyr from Reformation to RevolutionTrade Review“'Martyrdom is not a death but a story that gets written about a death.' From this simple yet profound premise, Alice Dailey takes us into a tour de force of historical formalism. Martyrdom, as Dailey brilliantly and delicately unpacks it, sits at the nexus of story and the material world. It works through both the suffering of the flesh and the shifting contours of narrative form. In a study that reaches across time (medieval to postmodern) and confessions (Protestant and Catholic), Dailey herself masterfully crafts a compelling story about the life of narrative. This book will naturally be of great value to students of early modern religion, but it will also fascinate anyone interested in how human lives—and the meanings of those lives—are shaped by, and lived through, narrative forms." —Kristen Poole, University of Delaware"Alice Dailey’s innovative new study of English martyrology details the transformations undergone by the narrative forms, theological meanings, and visual imagery of sacred suffering in Reformation England. In the period stretching from the sixteenth century through the end of the English Civil War, the Catholic underground was stymied in its search for the glory of the martyrs by the rhetoric of treason wielded against them by the Protestant state, but periodically sustained by its own powerful and resilient treasury of religious narratives. In this broad and bracing study, Dailey conceives of the Catholic question in a pluralist manner, to include not only the fates of individual Catholics and Catholic communities, but also the survival of Catholic literary and architectural forms in post-Reformation England." —Julia Reinhard Lupton, The University of California, Irvine“By emphasizing the significance of the formal qualities that characterize English Christian martyr narratives, Dailey insightfully demonstrates how attitudes toward martyrdom changed over time. . . . The readings of individual texts are both grounded and provocative.” —The Medieval Review“Detailed and lucid. . . . A fluent and thoughtful critique of some familiar texts.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Alice Dailey’s The English Martyr accounts for a transformation of the Christian martyr narrative through an analysis of four historical stages—paradigmatic establishment, appropriation, crisis of representation, and its ultimate shift in signification. Her account suggests that as historical pressures undermined typological repetition, the language remained while its signification changed.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Alice Dailey’s The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution makes a persuasive case for the value of the new formalist trend in literary studies. . . . Dailey’s book is a useful contribution to several intersecting scholarly conversations about martyrdom, early modern English religious and political strife, and new formalism more generally. . . . Students and scholars looking to gain a solid, detailed grounding in any of these conversations will find this book very helpful.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies“The strength of this book is not just that Dailey discusses the traditions of martyrology. She also discusses the ways in which these traditions changed over time. . . . Her careful and insightful reading of contemporary texts and the thoughtful conclusions she draws from this reading will be of great interest not just to historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but to anyone interested in how the modern world was, and is, constructed and how we both create and re-create the stories of the past.” —Journal of British Studies“Dailey’s prose is lucid and her close analysis of these key martyrological texts portrays the model Christian martyr comprehensively. It is admirable that she tackles martyrologies by both Catholics and Protestants, and across such a broad chronological range.” —English Historical Review“Dailey has provided an original work of contemporary scholarship . . . . Dailey has insightfully targeted her study at England from the time of its Reformation to its Revolution . . . . Dailey has provided a worthwhile volume.” —Anglican and Episcopal History
£26.99
University of Notre Dame Press The Sword and the Pen
Book SynopsisEisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets during the early 1500s and their contribution to culture.Trade Review“As if holding a diamond in the twilight, Eisenbichler examines each facet of [these women’s] lives, including intellectual friendships, heresy, political intrigue, and even a lesbian romance. . . . The Sword and the Pen is a major contribution to our understanding of female poets in the Renaissance and the glittering cultural climate of a proud but doomed city.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Eisenbichler not only provides an analysis of the poetry of these women [Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi] but also book dedications to them, revealing an intersection of poetry, politics, and sexuality. He has rescued their poetry from the narrow confines of interpretation . . . [and] contributed greatly to our knowledge of women’s thinking and writing.” —Magistra“Eisenbichler brings to his study of Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Martini Salvi the deep understanding of Renaissance culture, the confident mastery of archival and manuscript material, the keen eye for revelatory detail, and the lucid expository style that have distinguished his many previous publications. The result is a book that both increases the reader’s knowledge of particular writers in a particular time and place and shows how such particularities can be used to advance understanding of an entire society and its literary culture.” —Choice“This book is an excellent combination of historical and literary analysis. Confronted with a frustrating dearth of information on these women, The Sword and the Pen combines painstaking archival research, a careful analysis of biographical material, and a consideration of the women’s own works to sketch their family ties, their intellectual networks, and the details of their lives.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Our knowledge of how gender functions on many levels during the Renaissance has been greatly enhanced by Eisenbichler’s work. The inclusion of sonnets and poems composed by several other Sienese women, and their excellent translations, raises many more questions than it answers on the history of gender in Italy—which is Eisenbichler’s goal. A job well done.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Eisenbichler makes a compelling case for the unique aspects of women’s participation in sixteenth-century Siena’s literary networks. His book offers an enticing panorama of literary culture, where men and women of noble families wrote to each other, provoked one another, and built up each other’s reputations in the final years of the Republic of Siena.” —European History Quarterly“. . . Eisenbichler has authored a book which breaks new ground, suggests new readings of texts and places a number of Italian language texts into the hands of English language readers for the first time. . . . The book is well worth the read and the academic community will be well served through this important contribution.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance StudiesPainstakingly researched and well-argued throughout, The Sword and the Pen offers us case studies centered on Siena, showing that the silence enjoined on early modern women was a fiction for at least a literate subset of the population, who wrote not only about love but on politics. . . . this volume will become necessary reading for any scholar working on Italian early modernity, women writers, and cultural history.” —Early Modern Women Journal“Through nuanced renderings and interpretations of their poetry, poems written about them, and works dedicated to them, as well as biographical reconstructions drawn from his meticulous archival research, Eisenbichler fills lacunae, corrects errors, and uncovers his protagonists’ roles in and commentary upon their afflicted city and era . . . . This engagingly written and primary-source-rich study offers much to readers interested in Renaissance studies, Italian literature, and women’s and gender history.” —The Historian“Konrad Eisenbichler presents a sustained investigation of key female protagonists in sixteenth-century Siena’s literary culture. A key strength of this work is its careful analysis of three Sienese [women:] Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Martini Salvi. . . . Fine translations are followed by the original citations and Eisenbichler contextualizes his literary analysis with an impressive range of archival research.” —Parergon
£26.09
University of Notre Dame Press The Genius to Improve an Invention
Book SynopsisThe Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and perfect them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors. Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T.S. Eliot's idea of tradition and individual talent and Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence. In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.Trade Review“The book’s linguistic vicissitudes are intriguingly appropriate to its topic, which is the (mostly) translingual commerce between literary texts in which the difference evident in imitation can be understood as an inspired improvement." -- American Journal of Philology“Boitani’s slim book more than lives up to its unique production history in the extraordinary range of its subjects and insights. It is the kind of book that great men of letters once wrote.... [The Genius to Improve an Invention], once opened, it is a book almost impossible to put down.” -- Medium Aevum“This book deserves the attention of all who are interested in the processes of literary continuity and change.” -- Frank Kermode, King’s College, Cambridge University“The Genius to Improve an Invention is both substantial and graceful–a fascinating journey through some of the greatest works of Western literature, with a guide who is at once learned and entertaining, impassioned and moving.” -- Jill Mann“The Genius to Improve an Invention is supported with a thorough theoretical awareness and a flexible intelligence enabling Boitani to move comfortably within a vast array of texts and thus take the reader on a fascinating literary journey. Through his pressing and detailed argumentations, the author suggests original approaches to some of the great works of European literature—each of them is considered as a solution to a specific problem and, at the same time, as a probative argument in favor of applied rationality. Reading these essays calls to mind what Henry James once said, ‘all the pieces of the game [are] on the table together and each unconfusedly and contributively placed, as triumphantly scientific.’” -- Mario Lavagetto, University of Bologna
£17.99
University of Notre Dame Press Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy
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£92.70
University of Notre Dame Press Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy
Book SynopsisIn this new book, Arthur F. Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England. He considers Catholic writings that have been relatively neglected, as well as the discourse of anti-Catholicism. Straddling the boundary of history and literature, this study offers an intriguing cultural history that focuses on the ideologized fantasies and language found on both sides of the early modern Christian religious divide. Marotti focuses on the period between the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England in 1580 and the climax of ongoing religious conflict in the Restoration-era Popish Plot and the 1688 Glorious Revolution. In a series of thematically focused essays, he covers such issues as the relationship of print culture to the residual Catholic culture in Elizabethan England; recusant women, Jesuits and the cultural otheTrade Review“Marotti’s well-researched account is convincing and informative. . . .” —First Things“. . . Compelling and immensely readable . . . Marotti specifically chooses not to examine the canonical literature of the time in order to focus instead on the literature of religious controversy, in particular how the printing press affected the Reformation in England. He examines how opposing factions (Catholic and Anti-Catholic) used the printed word in an attempt to influence their respective audiences and characterize the times.” —Religion and the Arts“. . . The book’s coverage is broad; and though several of these essays have been reprinted from previous collections, they have a striking unity of purpose. . . Marotti’s study is probably the nearest ting we have to a survey: proudly anti-canonical, but also looking towards a new canon.” —Early Modern Literary Studies“. . . [Marotti] investigates the spirited conflict between Papists and Protestants from the time of Queen Elizabeth I to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Studying the use of printed material, the portrayal of martyrdom, the role of women and zealots, and Papish plots that threatened all levels of society, Marotti offers insight into a world not unlike our own.” —History“Arthur F. Marotti’s Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England restores visibility to the Catholic Other demonized by the Protestant Reformation in his exploration not about Catholics and especially about English Jesuits. Simultaneously impassioned and reasonable, Marotti’s work goes beyond a study of cultural operations to restore a sense of why these operations mattered, how they were experienced, and how they caused very real suffering and death.” —SEL: Studies in English Literature“Marotti . . . has written a book that is encyclopedic in scope, examining dozens of examples of English Recusant literature together with an ample supply of counter-examples from the Protestant majority. This literature had enormous impact on the political motivations of certain parties, and Marotti lays these out with considerable skill. This highly recommended volume surely will be of use to specialists in tracking the trajectory of English recusancy, though graduate and undergraduate readers in programs dealing with British literature will also take away much from Marotti’s exacting monograph.” —Catholic Library World“Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy makes a significant contribution to the literature and understanding of this period of passionately held faiths in conflict, of blurred political and religious identities, and of martyrs, royals, disguised religious, and troubled service of two (or more) masters—or the appearances thereof. Marotti’s endnotes deserve special mention. Because he employs so many rarely cited sources, historians will find these extensive listings a valuable and productive resource. This volume is an adept and adroit study of a crucial period in Catholic life in a time when Counter Reformation was a distinctly personal, daily, and uncomfortably mortal aspect of a Catholic’s life.” —Cistercian Studies Quarterly“This book is in itself an index of the degree to which the study of English recusant literature, and of the literary and controversial writings of the English Catholics, has entered the mainstream of literary and historical debate. Indeed, it should be honoured as something of a monument in the history of this area of scholarship.” —Archivum Historicum“Superb. . . . Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy is modestly disguised as a record of the imaginative life of the oppressed Catholic community in England—less a minority than a silenced and stricken majority—and of the cultural fantasies by which they and their Jesuit priests were steadily demonized in text, trial and on the scaffold. Its significance is much greater. The stories told in this book were taken as true by generations of Englishmen; they formed—and to some extent still form—part of British identity. . . .” —Times Literary Supplement“Professor Marotti’s book makes a constructive addition to the literature on religious conflict in early modern England. . . The primary value of the volume is his addition of Catholic sources to a discussion that among literary critics has been largely confined to their opponents.” —The Catholic Historical Review
£17.99
University of Notre Dame Press Poetry Does Theology
Book SynopsisWhat happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland.Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution-a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes'' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the latter half of the fourteenth century progressed.What had previously been the exclusive prerogative of a Latinate and clerical eliTrade Review“Rhodes’ book is an affirmation of the role that poets played in religious transformations of the late medieval period and a readable series of essays, each chapter acting as a fairly self-contained reading of one or two texts.... The text also contains several analytical gems relating the poetry to detailed readings of Hebrew Scripture, demonstrating the author’s exegetical talent. Of most interest to the literary scholar of late medieval poetry, it should also prove interesting to serious students of pre-Reformation English Christian thought.” —Religious Studies Review"The influence of Christian thinking on medieval English society is often reflected and refracted through the literature of the period. Analyses of the interplay between poetry and doctrine regularly add to the stream of literary criticism of Middle English texts, a tally to which Jim Rhodes adds his own contribution with this volume." —The Heythrop Journal"...refreshing and original points of view on well-known works. Rhodes's book establishes a provocative topic most worthy of further consideration." —Journal of Religion"As Jim Rhodes demonstrates in this readable and extremely intelligent book, the diverse ways in which Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-poet treat theological themes are intricate and subtle. ... Rhodes's book definitely breaks new ground by advancing our understanding of the theological facets of Ricardian literature." —Studies in the Age of Chaucer“Rhodes has produced an elegant and comprehensive assessment of the symbiotic relationship between poetry and theology in the late 14th century.” —Choice“Jim Rhodes, professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University, studies the symbiotic relationship between the poetry of 14th-century England and theology. He does this by a careful analysis of Robert Grosseteste’s Le chateau d’amour (The Castle of Love); Langland and the Four Daughters of God; the Pearl-Poet; the author of Saint Erkenwald; and four tales of Chaucer: the Prioress, the Second Nun, The Reeve, and the Pardoner.” —Theology Digest“Rhodes emerges as a reader to whom fictive persons matter, regardless of the century they inhabit, because they and their lives speak about us—not as subjectivities but as souls. His book deserves credit for treating both medieval religion and medieval poetry seriously as liberating elements in human life.” —Speculum
£31.50
University of Notre Dame Press Wisdom of Animals
Book SynopsisRandall explores the link between philosophical and theological discussions of the nature and status of animals vis-à-vis the rest of existence, particularly humans.Trade Review"Here is a book that breathes and inspires: terse and compelling, every page written with flair and force, The Wisdom of Animals reaches into the past to remind us that we are animals and that we must commit our faith to the world that, by no casual miracle, it is a gift for us to inhabit. Randall’s informed and sustained readings of a panoply of early modern writers tell us, in both their words and hers, why the intricate webbings of our ecosphere must be nurtured and cherished. Weaving together literature, theology and philosophy, she affirms over and again how and why animal wisdom is vital for the present and future of our imperiled planet." —Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University"Catharine Randall has written an informative, erudite, and convincing study of the complexity of thought concerning animals in the early modern period, and the importance of theological perspectives for that thought. The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality is an original contribution to the field, and is of potential interest not only to scholars of early modern French history and literature, but also to readers interested in religious studies, the history of animality, and the antecedents to current discussions of the status and rights of animals." —Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University“. . . an engaging and lively piece of scholarly exposition. Randall’s writing is fluent, the theological background is accessibly incorporated into the argument, and the succinct conclusion is compelling, uniting as it does a range of ‘creatures . . . who [open] up new, vibrant ways of experiencing both this world and that beyond it.’” —French Studies“This book is not without merits: the study of the swallow as an emblem and figure of Montaigne’s hermeneutics, for example, is a highly sophisticated reading of the literary uses of animals.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Randall’s book is an amazing testimony of the fact that early modernity did not only bring us René Descartes and his animal-despising philosophy but also has to offer animal-friendly philosophers, theologians, and poets. The book made me ponder how much human animals can learn from non-human animals and how much wisdom and ingenuity animals possess.” —Journal of Animal Ethics“In this book, Randall has offered the reader multiple avenues for entry: as a historian of animals, as one of early modern spirituality or of currents in the proto-scientific movement, and as an individual on a personal spiritual journey. Randall leaves the reader with many directions for further research . . . . Randall has produced a book provocative in its methodological apparatus, valuable in its textual analysis, and stimulating less for its conclusions than for its inspiration toward further research.” —H-France Review“Catharine Randall has written a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on animals and early modern cultures . . . . It is a testament to the interest of Randall’s analysis that the reader might be left wanting more.” —Modern Language Review“Drawing on a broad interdisciplinary context, Randall eruditely weaves together theology, anthropology, animal studies, and literature. . . She does a first-rate job exploring the significance of animals in each narrative in the context of their relationship to authority and tradition.” —Sixteenth Century Journal “Catharine Randall’s The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality argues . . . that religious writings and practices in early modern Europe reveal a shift toward increased compassion for animals that contributed directly to the animal rights movement and contemporary calls for animal liberation. The Wisdom of Animals represents a highly original contribution to the history of thinking about and thinking with animals.” —Modern Philology“Early modern scholars will be grateful to Catherine Randall for bringing Bougeant’s fascinating and little-known work to a wider readership. The Wisdom of Animals does begin, as its author claims, to map the many overlapping fields that comprise the study of early modern theology and the natural world. . .” —Medievalia et Humanistica
£20.89
University of Notre Dame Press Unwritten Verities
Book SynopsisIn Unwritten Verities: The Making of England''s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549, Sebastian Sobecki argues that the commitment by English common law to an unwritten tradition, along with its association with Lancastrian political ideas of consensual government, generated a vernacular legal culture on the eve of the Reformation that challenged the centralizing ambitions of Tudor monarchs, the scriptural literalism of ardent Protestants, and the Latinity of English humanists. Sobecki identifies the widespread dissemination of legal books and William Caxton''s printing of the Statutes of Henry VII as crucial events in the creation of a vernacular legal culture. He reveals the impact of medieval concepts of language, governance, and unwritten authority on such sixteenth-century humanists, reformers, playwrights, and legal writers as John Rastell, Thomas Elyot, Christopher St. German, Edmund Dudley, John Heywood, and Thomas Starkey. Unwritten Verities argues that Trade Review"Sebastian Sobecki’s lucid and lively study seeks to address a major lacuna in the current understanding of English vernacularity from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries: English common law. This huge body of knowledge and practice, written and unwritten, awaits focused attention from historians and literary historians, particularly in the light of new scholarship on Anglo-French vernacularity in this period. Sobecki’s ambitious, original, and deeply considered account includes such figures as John Fortescue, John Rastell, and Christopher St. German and their investments in and influence on early Tudor commonality. The range and intelligence of his approach to this material, his ability to think beyond period and disciplinary boundaries, and his alertness to the complex bilingual condition of English intellectuals add a compelling dimension to the debate on the linguistic and political shapes of insular identity in these centuries." —Ardis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English, Yale University"Unwritten Verities proposes an arresting and original thesis: that the English common law’s commitment to an oral tradition permitted it, on the eve of the Reformation, to become a transformative repository for notions of consensual government, of the inwardness of spiritual jurisdiction, and of the preeminence of English. This elegantly written and engagingly controversial book will stimulate literary scholars, legal historians, and historians of political thought to look afresh at some of their fundamental assumptions about English literature, politics, and the law at the turn of the fifteenth century." —Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews"Unwritten Verities boasts persuasive and original arguments that genuinely reframe the ways we understand English humanism, the history of print, and vernacular culture. . . . [The book] will surely become an indispensable text for anyone working on English law and vernacularity." —H-Law, H-Net Reviews“In this book, [Sobecki] delivers the sum of a wide range of parts and convey the importance of those pieces to a community of scholars accustomed to looking past them. Chapter after chapter features fresh, robust claims that shed light on authors rarely considered by critics and are sure to shape the direction of future scholarship.” —The Medieval Review"In his accessible and carefully researched book, Sobecki repositions Fortescue, St. German, and Rastell as thinkers concerned as much with the relationship between the English language and the common law as with England’s constitutional arrangements. The result is an argument that is simultaneously controversial, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging in its implications." —Sixteenth Century Journal"Unwritten Verities is an eloquently written work. In it, Sobecki’s absorbing arguments as to the significance and impact of the developments in English legal vernacularity are presented eruditely. . . . Due to the varied nature of the source material selected for analysis and the arguments proffered, Sobecki’s overarching discussion will be of undoubted value to those with interests as varied as medieval literature, early modern studies, constitutional law, social history and legal history in general." —Journal of Legal History“As readers of Sobecki’s earlier works already know, he is a very clever writer: both his general arguments and his asides are full of rich ideas. His literary analysis . . . is always clear and convincing. Indeed, it is an achievement to have written a book about literature that legal historians would find useful. . . The book [has] enduring value as a sharp explication of the textual and ideological complexities at work in the late-medieval and early modern common law.” —Speculum“Sebastian Sobecki makes the argument that English common law became the repository of consensual theories of government in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Unwritten Verities challenges the view of common law as insular even though in the early seventeenth century it later became the conduit for the idea of English particularity.” —Studies in English Literature“Pointing to the thousands of men in the mid-sixteenth century England—from attorneys and clerks to scriveners and lay readers of legal publications—who would be engaged with vernacular legal culture on a regular basis, Sobecki makes a compelling case for the development by the mid-sixteenth century of a vibrant vernacular legal culture in England. . . . Socbecki rightly questions assumptions that this period saw a turning away from the medieval and toward the modern. If Unwritten Verities is controversial, it is so not least because it challenges its readers to recognize the enduring if unacknowledged influence of medieval ideas about language, law, and the nature of political society.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“In Unwritten Verities, Sebastian Sobecki provides an engaging, interdisciplinary study of English Common law’s oral tradition. Emerging from this volume is a provocative consideration of the relationship between common law and Anglo-French vernacularity in late mediaeval and early modern England. Importantly, Sobecki’s examination of vernacular legal culture challenges late medieval periodization, connecting the writing of John Fortescue and other English legal thinkers to subsequent ideas about consensual and even socially inclusive government.” —Renaissance and Reformation
£26.99
University of Notre Dame Press Conflicts of Devotion
Book SynopsisThis book examines the role poetry played in England after religious reformation and shows that the liturgical character of poetry is essential to comprehending the shifts in English spiritual attitudes and practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Trade Review“Conflicts of Devotion is exceptionally well written and is subtly and persuasively argued, advancing scholarship in such important ways as to change our ways of thinking about the major poets of this period. It will have special value to graduate students and young academics looking for an approach to their own writing.” —Gerard Wegemer, University of Dallas"Cogent, clear and beautifully written, Conflicts of Devotion looks at how early modern English poets and prelates negotiate the threshold of religious identity in a religiously pluralist society. Ranging from Spenser to Southwell, from Cranmer to Crashaw, this book revises our understanding of generic conventions from the pastoral to the metaphysical. While Gibbons does not eschew controversy, he focuses on the strategies of compromise: liturgy, and the poetics that proceed from it, accommodate diverse religious belief in the rituals that give structure to the social world. Conflicts of Devotion provides stunning close readings and sound insights into the ecumenical design of early modern English poetry." —Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland"Although Daniel Gibbons' Conflicts of Devotion engages with the tensions suggested by his title, he incisively emphasizes the countervailing searches for spiritual unity and community. The argumentation is original and persuasive, the scholarship impeccable, and the prose elegant." —Heather Dubrow, Fordham University“. . . a valuable addition to the work being done on the intersection of literature and religion in early modern literary studies. The book’s approach, in contrast to the somewhat indistinct title, is specific and illuminating. . . . Gibbon’s approach to the complexities of early modern religious identities and to the nuances of the poets’ engagements with the religious controversies and subjects of their day is skillful, generous, and in this reviewer’s opinion, exemplary.” —Renaissance and Reformation“The book treads a careful path between emphasizing the religious discord and fragmentation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and producing the kind of ecumenical account of the period that has become more common in recent years and that has tended sometimes to overlook difference in the interest of affirming continuities among those of distinct religious persuasions. Gibbons locates the efforts of a wide range of writers to foster community specifically in the rhetorical techniques that they employ to accommodate difference.” —Modern Philology
£45.00
University of Notre Dame Press Volitions Face
Book SynopsisTrade Review“This exhilarating and brilliant book will be a most welcome and timely addition to the ReFormations series, to which it will add distinction. . . . It is also a book that can be relished sentence by sentence, as Escobedo is a writer of intellectual verve and boldness, making hard-won claims look obvious once made.” —Sarah Beckwith, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English, Duke University"In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo tracks the uses of allegorical personification from its prehistory in the Greek daemonic to its high points in Spenser and Milton. The originality of the argument is sure to draw attention, for Escobedo engages with the landmark studies of Fletcher, Teskey, and others, respectfully but convincingly redrawing the boundaries of the topic. He does so on the basis of a sustained and rigorous engagement with modern philosophical approaches to agency and volition, which lets him return to early modern literary texts in order to show how distinct conceptions of these categories are encoded within the literary practice of personification. It's a very strong book." —David Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina"Volition’s Face is remarkably subtle, nuanced, and comprehensive. Engaging works by Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, the book aims to capture premodern intuitions about the human will. Escobedo’s deft treatment of the tensions inherent in such a will—both cause and effect, both active and passive, both within and without—shows an intellectual control of a very high order. The historical sweep of Volition’s Face and its compelling arguments will make it an influential contribution to early modern literary studies." —David J. Baker, Peter G. Phialas Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“In chapter after chapter, Escobedo sees and delineates the connections between ancient and early modern ideas of personification and will, and it is difficult to do justice to the nuances of Escobedo’s argument in a brief review. Regardless, it is clear that specialists in medieval and Renaissance studies will find rewarding insights and significant contributions to the field in these pages.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Volition’s Face is a highly exhilarating, informative, and entertaining study. Escobedo often reminds the academic reader that the most obvious explanations belie a complex theoretical framework.” —Parergon“An excellent study, Volition’s Face is the most sophisticated account to date of the trope known as prosopopoeia, personification, as it developed from Classical times through the Christian Middle Ages to the Renaissance.” —Religion and Literature
£87.55
University of Notre Dame Press Volitions Face
Book SynopsisModern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculTrade Review“This exhilarating and brilliant book will be a most welcome and timely addition to the ReFormations series, to which it will add distinction. . . . It is also a book that can be relished sentence by sentence, as Escobedo is a writer of intellectual verve and boldness, making hard-won claims look obvious once made.” —Sarah Beckwith, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English, Duke University"In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo tracks the uses of allegorical personification from its prehistory in the Greek daemonic to its high points in Spenser and Milton. The originality of the argument is sure to draw attention, for Escobedo engages with the landmark studies of Fletcher, Teskey, and others, respectfully but convincingly redrawing the boundaries of the topic. He does so on the basis of a sustained and rigorous engagement with modern philosophical approaches to agency and volition, which lets him return to early modern literary texts in order to show how distinct conceptions of these categories are encoded within the literary practice of personification. It's a very strong book." —David Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina"Volition’s Face is remarkably subtle, nuanced, and comprehensive. Engaging works by Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, the book aims to capture premodern intuitions about the human will. Escobedo’s deft treatment of the tensions inherent in such a will—both cause and effect, both active and passive, both within and without—shows an intellectual control of a very high order. The historical sweep of Volition’s Face and its compelling arguments will make it an influential contribution to early modern literary studies." —David J. Baker, Peter G. Phialas Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“In chapter after chapter, Escobedo sees and delineates the connections between ancient and early modern ideas of personification and will, and it is difficult to do justice to the nuances of Escobedo’s argument in a brief review. Regardless, it is clear that specialists in medieval and Renaissance studies will find rewarding insights and significant contributions to the field in these pages.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Volition’s Face is a highly exhilarating, informative, and entertaining study. Escobedo often reminds the academic reader that the most obvious explanations belie a complex theoretical framework.” —Parergon“An excellent study, Volition’s Face is the most sophisticated account to date of the trope known as prosopopoeia, personification, as it developed from Classical times through the Christian Middle Ages to the Renaissance.” —Religion and Literature
£28.80
University of Notre Dame Press Queen of Heaven
Book SynopsisThe belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven's Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy.Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost Catholic symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era.Grindlay's study of the Queen of Heaven affordsTrade Review"Grindlay writes about an era that was going through a sort of adolescence, as new forms of power emerged in the body politic, in academia, and in the market place. In our own time, we face a similar sort of adolescence as the issues of communication, intelligence, and human identity confront us. This thoughtful study of the Virgin Mary reminds us that it is in beauty rather than function that the heavenly power and attraction of the Mother of Christ resides." —Church Times"Despite being powerfully backed by a reigning monarch, the English Reformation also necessitated the dethronement of a reigning monarch. Dethroned monarchs never go quietly into the dark. Ever fainter echoes? Fading nostalgia? Secular disguise? A vanishing Virgin? Not so, argues Lilla Grindlay in this vigorous and rich book: Mary the Queen of Heaven stubbornly sticks around, taking many forms, some lurid, as she reclaims her throne." —James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University"The book makes an original contribution to the fields of gender studies and English religious and literary studies. Lilla Grindlay offers an important corrective to the long-standing claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary disappears from English religious writing at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. The book is very well written. Grindlay's care for her subject is evident in every sentence. Ultimately, her goal is to persuade the reader that their understanding of the post-Reformation/post-medieval status of the Virgin is incomplete. The book is really lovely to read. Grindlay has taken great care to make her work accessible, interesting, and important."—Patricia Badir, author of The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700“This is a thoroughly stimulating volume, clearly written and helpfully sign-posted throughout that demonstrates Grindlay’s erudition as a literary scholar. It makes a helpful contribution to the field of English Reformation Studies and offers interesting insights for those studying gender in the early modern period.” —British Catholic History“Grindlay’s book is timely and valuable, and remedies an important gap in Reformation studies by encouraging its readers to consider more nuanced accounts of cultural loss.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Grindlay explains clearly and concisely why the (extra-scriptural) teachings that Mary was physically taken into heaven after her death and crowned queen of heaven created such a stark dividing line between Protestant and Catholic religious and literary culture.” —The Journal of Theological StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on the text Introduction: The Vanishing Virgin? 1. The Virgin’s Assumption and Coronation through the Ages Part 1. “Some out of Vanity Will Call Her the Queene of Heaven” 2. The Queen of Heaven in Protestant Religious Discourse 3. Sham Queens of Heaven: Iconoclasm and the Virgin Mary Part 2. Voices from the Shadows 4. The Virgin Mary and the Godly Protestant Woman 5. The Queen of Heaven and the Sonnet Mistress: the Sacred and Secular Poems of Henry Constable 6. A Garland of Aves: The Queen of Heaven and the Rosary 7. The Assumption and Coronation in the Poetry of Robert Southwell Epilogue Bibliography
£70.55
University of Notre Dame Press Queen of Heaven
Book SynopsisThe belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven's Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy.Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost Catholic symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era.Grindlay's study of the Queen of Heaven affordsTrade Review"Grindlay writes about an era that was going through a sort of adolescence, as new forms of power emerged in the body politic, in academia, and in the market place. In our own time, we face a similar sort of adolescence as the issues of communication, intelligence, and human identity confront us. This thoughtful study of the Virgin Mary reminds us that it is in beauty rather than function that the heavenly power and attraction of the Mother of Christ resides." —Church Times"Despite being powerfully backed by a reigning monarch, the English Reformation also necessitated the dethronement of a reigning monarch. Dethroned monarchs never go quietly into the dark. Ever fainter echoes? Fading nostalgia? Secular disguise? A vanishing Virgin? Not so, argues Lilla Grindlay in this vigorous and rich book: Mary the Queen of Heaven stubbornly sticks around, taking many forms, some lurid, as she reclaims her throne." —James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University"The book makes an original contribution to the fields of gender studies and English religious and literary studies. Lilla Grindlay offers an important corrective to the long-standing claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary disappears from English religious writing at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. The book is very well written. Grindlay's care for her subject is evident in every sentence. Ultimately, her goal is to persuade the reader that their understanding of the post-Reformation/post-medieval status of the Virgin is incomplete. The book is really lovely to read. Grindlay has taken great care to make her work accessible, interesting, and important."—Patricia Badir, author of The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700“This is a thoroughly stimulating volume, clearly written and helpfully sign-posted throughout that demonstrates Grindlay’s erudition as a literary scholar. It makes a helpful contribution to the field of English Reformation Studies and offers interesting insights for those studying gender in the early modern period.” —British Catholic History“Grindlay’s book is timely and valuable, and remedies an important gap in Reformation studies by encouraging its readers to consider more nuanced accounts of cultural loss.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Grindlay explains clearly and concisely why the (extra-scriptural) teachings that Mary was physically taken into heaven after her death and crowned queen of heaven created such a stark dividing line between Protestant and Catholic religious and literary culture.” —The Journal of Theological StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on the text Introduction: The Vanishing Virgin? 1. The Virgin’s Assumption and Coronation through the Ages Part 1. “Some out of Vanity Will Call Her the Queene of Heaven” 2. The Queen of Heaven in Protestant Religious Discourse 3. Sham Queens of Heaven: Iconoclasm and the Virgin Mary Part 2. Voices from the Shadows 4. The Virgin Mary and the Godly Protestant Woman 5. The Queen of Heaven and the Sonnet Mistress: the Sacred and Secular Poems of Henry Constable 6. A Garland of Aves: The Queen of Heaven and the Rosary 7. The Assumption and Coronation in the Poetry of Robert Southwell Epilogue Bibliography
£31.50
University of Notre Dame Press Fleshly Tabernacles
Book SynopsisFleshly Tabernacles examines how John Milton’s engagement with the Incarnation affected nonconformist sects of revolutionary England.Trade Review"Fleshly Tabernacles is an important investigation of the Incarnation in Milton's thought and works and in revolutionary England, especially in the 1640s and 1650s. This is a learned, often powerful, and conceptually rich study of an important topic in its broad cultural context. Bryan Adams Hampton makes an original contribution to the field of seventeenth-century literary and religious studies." —David Loewenstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison"In Fleshly Tabernacles Bryan Adams Hampton brings fresh attention to the critical topic of Milton's heterodox Christology and its implications for his efforts as polemicist and poet. Hampton's arguments are particularly illuminating as they concern the idiosyncratic doctrine of the incarnate word presented in Milton's theological treatise in relation to his poetry. This original and thought-provoking book concludes with telling studies of heterodox incarnational theology as it shapes the writings of other radical seventeenth-century English religious writers such as Gerrard Winstanley and James Nayler." —John Rumrich, University of Texas at Austin“Bryan Hampton’s book makes an original and important contribution to the field of Milton studies, as well as to the study of seventeenth-century radical English religious thought. His work has further implications for the study of comparative hermeneutics, proposing provocative continuities and correlations between medieval and early modern approaches to interpretation on the one hand, and contemporary theories of language and meaning on the other. Exhaustively researched and meticulously annotated, Hampton’s readings of incarnational epistemologies offer a wealth of insights and suggestive parallels among early modern writers who are not often taken together.” —Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson, University of Miami“By taking the Logos seriously as divinity and language, Fleshly Tabernacles finds new depths in seventeenth-century religious poetry, and adds a great deal to our understanding of Milton’s Christology. It develops a wide array of critical approaches, deftly synthesizing Patristic with postmodern theologians, with the historically specific discourses of early modern preachers and radicals, with language theorists such as Ricoeur and Wittgenstein, with Milton and Milton criticism.” —Milton Quarterly“Hampton’s Fleshly Tabernacles is an interesting exposition of how Milton’s Christology shaped his reading, writing, and politics. It focuses on the Incarnation as a central preoccupation throughout Milton’s oeuvre and how Incarnational thinking was applied to such disparate realms as poetics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and economics. . . . Hampton’s book can be praised for its boldness, and the requisite command of the Miltonic corpus required to sustain such a sweeping argument is impressive.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Fleshly Tabernacles is a clearly learned and meticulously researched piece of Milton scholarship, which students of intellectual and cultural history will find extremely useful.” —Renaissance Quarterly“. . . anyone interested in Milton will want to engage Fleshly Tabernacles. Hampton’s scholarship here is certainly worthy of the common accolade offered in each of three back-cover blurbs from eminent Milton scholars (David Loewenstein, John Rumrich, Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson): this book makes an ‘original’ and ‘important’ (or ‘thought-provoking’) contribution to Milton studies. This I affirm and add only that Hampton does this in a lucid prose style that incarnates his superb reading of Milton’s texts in a more virtuous fashion.” —Modern Philology“The strength of this book lies in Hampton’s wide interests in literature, theology, and hermeneutics. . . . Fleshly Tabernacles sets us well on the way toward discovering new registers of meaning in writing that embodies the complex material, spiritual, and political meanings of the Incarnation in seventeenth-century England.” —Renaissance and Reformation
£87.55
University of Notre Dame Press Savoring Power Consuming the Times
Book SynopsisPina Palma's Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature is an innovative look at the writings of five important Italian authorsBoccaccio's Decameron, Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Innamorato, Ariosto's Furioso, and Aretino's Ragionamento. Through the prism of gastronomy, Palma examines these key works in the Western literary canon, bringing into focus how their authors use food and gastronomy as a means to critique the social, political, theological, philosophical, and cultural beliefs that constitute the fabric of the society in which they live. Palma begins with the anthropological principle that food represents the universal transformation of nature into culture and that it functions as a language that distinguishes every society and its culture from others. This suggests that foodits preparation, presentation, and consumptionis more than merely a source of nourishment. RTrade Review"With clarity and wit, Pina Palma has used the central metaphor of food to uncover unexpectedly fresh dimensions of Renaissance intellectual traditions. Her fascinating and original exploration of the connections between food and sexuality, political power, moral hypocrisy, ascetic discipline of the body, and the world of the appetites in a selection of key Italian Renaissance works is sure to engage historians as well as literary scholars." —Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University"Savoring Power, Consuming the Times is not simply a book about food in Italian literature. It is a subtle and far-reaching work of criticism, which discloses an original aspect of the Renaissance. Not only does food provide a way of accessing a privileged perspective on the Renaissance religious, philosophical, and moral thinking; but it is also the perfect means of building an unexpected web of relationships between authors." —Salvatore Silvano Nigro, Libera Universita di Lingue e Comunicazione, IULM“This book will be a landmark. . . This richly detailed, consistently fascinating study deepens readers’ understanding of early-modern Italian literature and shows there is much more to literary criticism than the merely literary. Highly recommended.” —Choice“Savoring Power, Consuming the Times studies a group of important literary works of the Italian Renaissance in an attempt to understand the ideological and literary implications of food metaphors. . . . The main thrust of the book remains high literature where the analysis of food metaphors is the key to understanding that culture in its broadest context.” —Renaissance Quarterly“. . . the strength of Palma’s book is the variety of texts considered and the messages she is able to tease out in her analysis. Her weaving of historical context throughout her literary analysis not only supports her themes, but also allows Savoring Power, Consuming the Times to serve as a relevant text for historians, as well as for literary scholars.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies“. . . the reality of this beautiful book is that it analyzes food not only as nourishment but as reference and ‘tool’ used by culture and literature to teach, explain, and critique. Pina Palma’s book is an intriguing read that goes well beyond appearances and brings to light an intricate network of connections that a modern reader would definitely miss without the help of her accurate and well-balanced transversal reading.” —Renaissance and Reformation“In undertaking this broader analysis, Palma illuminates the shared ideas and concerns that link her five authors across three centuries. Her work, then, is more than a simple canonical study. . . . it is a rich and useful work with many fascinating ideas for students of literature, history, philosophy, and cultural theory.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Pina Palma investigates the representation of food in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature by stressing its metaphorical meanings and its multifaceted connections with language, society, history, politics, power, art, and nature. . . . Savoring Power, Consuming the Times provides a stimulating opportunity to reread some masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature through the lens of food, and to discover fascinating, complex, and sometimes overlooked metaphorical meanings.” —Modern Language Review“The volume of Pina Palma presents the analysis of a series of works or Italian literature medieval and early modern age, centered on food and the different implications it entails: the representation of power relations among social groups to ethical evaluation of the reports and human behavior.” —The Medieval Review
£105.40
University of Notre Dame Press Shakespeare and Abraham
Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare's dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare's early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford's attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert's providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor's surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright's full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes thTrade Review"Ken Jackson's Shakespeare and Abraham poses a powerful model for how a biblical hero can be recovered within a number of divergent dramatic contexts—both Shakespearean and medieval—as well as in philosophy and theology. Writing with great clarity about challenging ideas, Jackson has led us a great deal closer to understanding the meanings that the binding of Isaac held for Shakespeare." —Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine"Ken Jackson’s powerfully argued book challenges us to rethink what religion may have meant to Shakespeare and what it may yet come to mean for us. Neither secular nor orthodox, neither skeptical nor pious, Jackson’s Shakespeare is nevertheless a passionately committed playwright deeply aware of the inescapably religious dimensions of everyday life. Through a series of startling readings, Jackson shows Shakespeare bearing witness to a desire for pure generosity that quickens even as it unsettles the three great monotheisms. Shakespeare and Abraham is high-stakes criticism sure to provoke." —Gary Kuchar, University of Victoria“Ken Jackson’s timely book makes a forceful case for attending to Shakespeare’s engagement with the Abrahamic roots of monotheism as a way of looking anew at some of the most perplexing moments in the plays. Reevaluating the playwright’s attitude toward religion without getting bogged down in debates over doctrinal commitments, Jackson gives us a Shakespeare deeply invested in religious questions, if not religious controversy. Moving effortlessly among theological, literary, and philosophical works from antiquity to the present, Jackson reveals that Shakespeare’s response to Abraham raises urgent questions about the intersections of religion and culture in early modern England that are no less relevant today.” —James A. Knapp, Edward Surtz, S.J., Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago"Not long ago, Shakespeare criticism generally cast the Bard as a protomodern secular humanist. Lately, the foundational importance of religion to his art has come to the fore. To this new critical recognition, Jackson adds a study of how the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham, in Genesis 22 informs six plays—3 Henry VI, King John, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens—that today’s audiences and presenters alike consider difficult. . . . Jackson’s exposition . . . is hardly easy reading, but it is rich in freshening insights." —Booklist"For Ken Jackson, Shakespeare is not the secular, modern writer so many critics construct: he is a deeply religious thinker. . . . Jackson's remarkable conclusion is that Shakespeare, like Kierkegaard and Derrida, points in the direction of a certain Abraham beyond Christianity and outside Western metaphysics." —Times Literary Supplement“Jackson’s stance is less dogmatic than many of the ‘religious turn’ claims that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic . . . . The book is consistently provocative.” —Choice"While any number of books analyze Shakespeare’s plays and either his religious leanings or biblical imagery, Ken Jackson has a much tighter focus: the famously difficult Genesis 22 story of Abraham and Isaac and its echoes throughout certain of Shakespeare’s plays.” —Catholic Library World“Jackson’s approach is not just a philological overview of overt references to Genesis, chapter 22; he makes the so-called Binding of Isaac emblematic of Shakespeare’s philosophical struggles with the relationships between religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. . . Shakespeare and Abraham is an excellent inquiry into a rather niche research question. Jackson’s reading, though novel, is very compelling, and resolves some of Shakespeare’s most perplexing moments in a way that almost seems obvious in hindsight.” —Comitatus “Ken Jackson’s marvelously provocative book Shakespeare and Abraham pushes back against historiographical masterplots in which modernity is realized via secularization. . . Jackson finds, in this premodern text’s grappling with the story of Abraham, a powerful theorization of faith now made legible once again via modern and postmodern theory. This argument works strongly against periodizing ideas about medieval Christianity: it recovers something urgent in medieval though, something that has been occluded and ignored as a result of ideas about progress, secularization and modernity.” —Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama “This very accessible book allows the reader to learn a great deal about major issues in biblical and Shakespearean studies in less than 200 pages.” —America
£70.55
University of Notre Dame Press Tropologies
Book SynopsisTropologies studies the medieval and early modern theory of morality in scripture, arguing that tropology is both a way to interpret the Bible and a theory of literary invention. Trade Review"This is a major book, which takes us back to a body of well-known vernacular texts and asks us to look at them in an entirely new light. Students of the history of Christian thought and of Middle English literature alike will want to pay careful attention to Tropologies as it traces the close connections between medieval biblical exegesis and vernacular poetics and demonstrates the extent of their interdependence. McDermott’s concern is with literary and religious history, bringing often brilliant new insights to the study of the relationship of Latin and vernacular, the effects of the Reformation on the practice of 'thinking with Scripture,' and the poems and plays that lie at the center of his analysis. In another sense, however, Tropologies is itself an exercise in tropological exegesis, obliging us to confront basic questions about the ethical demands of writing, reading, and living in time. It will be widely read and broadly influential." —Nicholas Watson, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, Harvard University"Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 is a work of great and generous ambition, of intelligence both sharp and warm. It takes with equal seriousness the concerns of literary scholarship in our present and the concerns of biblical exegesis in the medieval and Reformation past, and shows how brightly they illuminate each other. At once irenic and challenging, this is a book that needs seriously to be reckoned with." —Steven Justice, Chancellor's Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley"This is an original book. It draws confidently on a wide range of medieval critical and scholarly work, as well as on a cogent body of contemporary theory and theology. It not only moves easily and eloquently between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries but also delves back into the 'tropological' Christian thought of the previous thousand years." —Nicolette Zeeman, University of Cambridge“Ryan McDermott offers an impressive new study on biblical interpretation with Tropologies. He pushes us to consider, to an extent heretofore not done, the importance of the tropological mode of biblical interpretation, which is an approach to finding ethical meaning in biblical passages (even or especially those without explicit moral messages), not only for the late medieval and early modern periods, but also in present day biblical studies.” —Reading Religion“[Tropologies] takes the reader on a fascinating journey of religious exegesis and the moral sense of scriptures. . . . McDermott’s sites of inquiry are poetry, religious literature, and drama, showing how these different types of text ask the reader to reconsider the scriptures leading to salvation and the ways in turn these manuscripts transforms the reader’s perception and support and active contribution to the field of tropological exegesis.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“In this encompassing and intensely argued monograph, Ryan McDermott sets forth an important new account of medieval literary ethics. . . . McDermott articulates his claims in dialogue with an array of intellectual traditions—exegetical, literary-critical, philosophical, phenomenological, and anthropological, among others. There is almost no concept he deploys that is left unsounded: invention, figural reading, the literal sense, exemplarity, chiasmus, mirroring—all are searchingly defined rather than assumed in McDermott’s use of them.” —Modern Philology“This fascinating book investigates the use of the tropological mode of reading in a range of texts, mostly form the late medieval period. . . . I recommend this book highly, especially to those interested in historical continuities between the medieval and early modern periods, and to those interested in alternatives to rhetorical methods of thinking about the link between words and actions.” —Parergon“Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England draws on literary, theological, and other texts in a study of medieval and early modern views of the moral sense of scripture.” —The Chronicle Review.
£105.40
Pennsylvania State University Press Notes on Footnotes
Book SynopsisA collection of essays by scholars of eighteenth-century literature, sharing their experiences as both producers and users of explanatory annotations.Trade Review“This collection synthesizes key issues of scholarly annotation for the first time, not by providing a single definitive set of rules and procedures but by setting out the broad spectrum of considerations that should be in the minds of editors (and publishers). It is by far the most comprehensive treatment of these issues to date and thus fills a long-felt want.”—Pat Rogers,author of Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne“Every single essay in Notes on Footnotes is not just readable but entertaining, not just learned but intelligent, not just well-argued but compelling. This will be a book with appeal far beyond fellow-editors; it will make eager annotators of us all.”—Cynthia Wall,author of Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque“A really fascinating look at a subject that few have given more than a passing thought to, Notes on Footnotes is a worthy addition to your bookshelf.”—Cliff Cunningham Sun News Austin
£26.96
Pennsylvania State University Press Paradise Lost A Poem Written in Ten Books
Book SynopsisAppearing in tandem with the publication of an authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, these insightful essays by ten Miltonists establish the significant differences between the text, context, and effect of the poem's first edition (1667) and those of the now-standard second edition. In bringing together essays by various hands, editors Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross seek to map what may be termed a new frontier in Milton studies, one that acknowledges the importance of what Milton himself considered to be the work of a lifetime when he offered Paradise Lost to readers in 1667. While the scholars writing here do not claim that the first edition of Milton's epic should be viewed as supplanting the second and later editions, they do seek to demonstrate the importance of coming to terms with the original ten-book edition both as a work with its own identity and value and as a source of fundamental insight into the nature of the editions that would follow in its wake. Paradise Lost cannot be fully understood without an awareness of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the forces through which it made its first and subsequent appearances in the world at large.Table of ContentsPreface1. Back to the Future: Paradise Lost 1667Michael Lieb2. “More and More Perceiving”: Paraphernalia and Purpose in Paradise Lost, 1668, 1669Joseph Wittreich3. Simmons’s Shell Game: The Six Title Pages of Paradise LostStephen B. Dobranski4. Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost in Its Historical and Literary ContextsAchsah Guibbory5. The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles IIRichard J. DuRocher6. “Now let us play”: Paradise Lost and Pleasure Gardens in Restoration LondonLaura Lunger Knoppers7. “[N]ew Laws thou see’st impos’d”: Milton’s Dissenting Angels and the Clarendon Code, 1661–65Bryan Adams Hampton8. Poetic Justice: Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (1667)Phillip J. Donnelly9. The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing: Paradise Lost and the God Beyond NamesMichael Bryson10. “That which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!”: Paradise Lost, First Edition John T. ShawcrossNotesAbout the ContributorsIndex
£26.96
University of Texas Press Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England
Book SynopsisThe author convincingly shows that writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Visual Art in the New Arcadia 2. Donne, Jonson, and the Priority of Picture 3. Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture” and Lord Herbert’s “To his Mistress for her true Picture”: Poetic Invention on Pictorial Themes 4. Richard Crashaw: The “Holy Strife” of Pencil and Pen 5. Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, and the Flowering of English Art 6. Herrick’s Hesperidean Garden: Ut pictura poesis Applied 7. Lady Drury’s Oratory: The Painted Closet from Hawstead Hall Notes Index
£15.19
University of Washington Press Mobilizing Krishnas World
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Those interested in Indian religions, bhakti and the formation of mod-ern Hinduism, the history of literatures and languages in South Asia, the emergence of a public sphere and early modernity, and the relationship of images to literature willfind this volume particularly rewarding." * History of Religions *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Texts, Transliterations, and Dates Introduction: Rādhā-Krishna Devotion in Kishangarh 1. Soldiers Marching: Kishangarh at the Crossroads 2. Gods and Saints Relocated: Sectarian Rivalries and Hinduism in the Making 3. Devotees on the Move: The Pilgrim’s Bliss 4. Legends Mobilized: Garland of Stories and Songs 5. Myth Retold: Garland of Rāma’s Romance Conclusion: Pilgrimage, Hagiography, and Scripture Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index
£33.98
University of Washington Press Shakespeare in American Life
Book SynopsisCelebrates Shakespeare's influence on American culture. This book contains essays which explore Shakespeare's influence on America's cultural history from a variety of perspectives. It includes essays from the colonial period, to the adoption of Shakespeare as an "American genius" in the nineteenth century, to twentieth-century musical comedy.Table of ContentsForeword / Gail Kern PasterIntroduction / Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. VaughanShakespeare Discovers America; America Discovers Shakespeare / Alden T. VaughanMaking Shakespeare American: Shakespeare's Dissemination in Nineteenth-Century America / Virginia Mason VaughanPlaying with (a) Difference: Early Black Shakespearean Actors, Blackface and Whiteface / Francesca T. RoysterShakespeare Film in America: O Brave New World of Bardolatry! / Kenneth S. RothwellShakespeare and the American Musical / Irene G. DashJazzing Up Shakespeare / Douglas M. LanierAmerican Shakespeare Festivals / Yu Jin KoDuty and Enjoyment: The Folgers as Shakespeare Collectors in the Gilded Age / Georgianna ZieglerCatalogue of the Exhibition / Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. VaughanInterlude: American Scrapbooks / Leigh Anne PalmerNotes on Contributors
£30.10
Yale University Press The Real Shakespeare Retrieving the Early Years
Book SynopsisIn an account of the first 30 years of Shakespeare's life, Eric Sams controverts all orthodox editions, biographies and references. He reveals how the playwright's youth has been concealed within a web of literary theories which misrepresent his life and work, and his early plays.Table of ContentsPart 1 The country background: reading and writing; the family home and trades; religion, school and Latin; the early theatre; poverty; butchery and by-products; John Shakespeare's Catholic testament; Lancashire; the law clerk; Lucy and his deer; marriage and departure; theatre, work and company; the battle of the books; wits and their butts - Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Lodge, Peele, Lyly. Appendices: allies - Harvey and Spenser; the Parnassus plays; Willobie his avisa; the sonnets; the actor-playwright of the 1590s. Part 2 Style - the noted weed: Ur Hamlet; Hamlet 1603; the taming of a shrew; the troublesome reign; contention and true tragedy; faire em and locrine; man's wit and the dialogue of dives; early start and revision; "Bad Quartos" and "Memorial Reconstruction by Actors"; "Source Plays", "Derivative Plays" and plagiarism; dating and "Collaboration"; "Stylometry"; handwriting; documents.
£17.63
Yale University Press Cervantes Don Quixote
Book SynopsisTrade Review“The analysis is sharp, and the points of reference are consistently engaging . . . the syntheses, range of inquiry, and knowledge of the period are impressive.”—Choice * Choice *
£19.99
Yale University Press Hamlet
Book SynopsisWilliam Shakespeare'sHamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusivevery like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to pluck the heart out of its mystery, as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided. Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is about, therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici's valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical processat once a prTrade Review“His first book on Shakespeare and it is typically original… Josipovici is such a great critic because he has a nose for the big questions and for what doesn’t work as an answer. Best of all, he reads carefully and asks the right questions.”—David Herman, Jewish Chronicle -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle *“Full of resonant and evaluative comparisons… Josipovici’s historicism, like that of T.S Eliot whom he he quotes often, is broad-brush and confident… a careful character-based plot summary, the book does give moments of real insight.”—Bart Vanes, TLS -- Bart Vanes * TLS *
£31.56
Yale University Press How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage
Book SynopsisA masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan EnglandTrade Review“Subtle and insightful readings . . . The high point of Mr. Lake’s book is his masterly analysis of Henry V. . . . Anyone interested in Shakespeare should make the effort to read this book. Even someone intimately familiar with the plays will discover much that is new, from details of historical background to interpretations of specific passages.”—Paul A. Cantor, Wall Street Journal“In this huge chronologically ordered study, Peter Lake coalesces the English Histories with Shakespeare’s Roman plays to argue that the history plays reflect a distinct trace left by the real political manoeuvrings of the period, and provides a wealth of historical information to underpin his case.”—Rene Weis, BBC History“Well deserving of a space on readers’ shelves” —Marisa R. Cull, American Historical Review“[T]he scholarship on display is admirable, and the arguments clear and well-constructed. Those with an interest in the political dynamics which drove Shakespeare to shape his plays as he did, and who wonder just how he managed to balance the expression on stage of radical ideas about kingship, the rule of law and the will of the people with living in the uncertain and often violent political reality of late Elizabethan England...will find this book deeply thought-provoking.”—Paul Flux, Albion Magazine'An immensely learned and deeply insightful monograph disguised as a page-turner. Lake offers the most lucid and believable account to date of, as the title promises, how Shakespeare put politics on the stage. Required reading not only for all Shakespeareans but for anyone interested in how literature speaks to and is shaped by its historical moment.' - Debora Shuger, author of Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England 'Even as Shakespeare’s histories illuminate his times, his times cast light upon those plays. Peter Lake, whose grasp of the Elizabethan political scene is exceptional, illuminates both Shakespeare’s world and works. Historians and literary scholars alike will find this a deeply engaging and comprehensive study.'—James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606'Peter Lake has written an astonishing book, even for Peter Lake. Learned, lively, provocative and often surprising, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage is a brilliant account of Elizabethan politics and Shakespeare’s extraordinary mediation of them. It is a wonderfully sensitive and supple work of literary criticism as well as a deeply engaged account of how Shakespeare’s England (which only retrospectively became “his”) thought about the most urgent political issues of the day.' - David Scott Kastan, author of A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion
£26.12
Yale University Press Vagrant Figures Law Literature and the Origins of
Book SynopsisHow vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distributionTrade Review“A superb book. Its historical depth and geographical breadth accomplishes far more than most literary scholars, writing on this topic, have done in recent years.”—Betty Joseph, Rice University“A cultural criticism built on the close reading of texts, a model of careful and conscientious reading, and a vital contribution to our understanding of literature’s ideological work.”—Eugenia Zuroski, McMaster University“Nicolazzo finds the roots of modern policing in the earliest days of the American colonies and traces compelling connections between the local minutiae of vagrancy law and the vast, brutal sweep of British imperial expansion.”—Charlotte Sussman, Duke University“Reading lyric poetry, fiction, and memoir together with statutory law and the bureaucratic ephemera of various legal functionaries, Sal Nicolazzo dramatically expands our understanding of policing and of the practices and narratives that accompanied it in the early modern period.”—Simon Stern, University of Toronto
£52.25
WW Norton & Co Landscapes of the Passing Strange
Book SynopsisA photographic journey into the imaginative world of Shakespeare's plays.
£20.89
WW Norton & Co The Golden Age of Spanish Drama
Book SynopsisA new Norton Critical Edition to fuel the renewed interest in this energetic field of study.
£14.99
Wiley 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare
Book SynopsisThis book addresses common myths and misconceptions about Shakespeare and his works offering authoritative, up-to-date and even-handed treatments of controversies and scholarly disagreements.Trade Review"Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith's 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare is a thought-provoking myth-buster ... It entertains the reader with new material and detective-like connections ... A huge amount of research, work and selection lies behind this book, and it pays off. Not just students, but every academic should take note." (Times Literary Supplement, 29 November 2013) "Lively, enjoyable and sensible throughout." (London Review of Books, 5 December 2013) "The myth that Macbeth is jinxed in the theatre, is, says Maguire, a 'self-fulfilling prophecy based on a hoax.' And so it is, and delightfully so, but you’ll have to read the book to find out why." (Irish Examiner, 5 June 2013). "This is a good book by trustworthy Shakespeareans ... The individual myths, structured into moderate-length essays (thus you do not have to read them in order), can be excellent for discussions in the classroom or lecture-room. Though the book obviously targets readership already into Shakespeare, every novice will enjoy finding satisfactory answers to the myths they are bothered with." (Huffington Post, 24 April 2013) "The value of this little book lies in its ceaseless exploration." (Times Higher Education, 7 March 2013) "Even if you know Shakespeare well, this delightful book will offer thought-provoking new angles." (The Scotsman, 2 March 2013) "A book that manages the rare feat of exercising scholarly caution...while still providing a highly entertaining portrait of the man himself." (Sunday Times, 24 February 2013)Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Myth 1 Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time 6 Myth 2 Shakespeare was not well educated 11 Myth 3 Shakespeare’s plays should be performed in Elizabethan dress 18 Myth 4 Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed 26 Myth 5 Shakespeare never traveled 34 Myth 6 Shakespeare’s plays are politically incorrect 40 Myth 7 Shakespeare was a Catholic 47 Myth 8 Shakespeare’s plays had no scenery 54 Myth 9 Shakespeare’s tragedies are more serious than his comedies 60 Myth 10 Shakespeare hated his wife 66 Myth 11 Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech 72 Myth 12 Hamlet was named after Shakespeare’s son 80 Myth 13 The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes 86 Myth 14 Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright 94 Myth 15 Shakespeare was a plagiarist 99 Myth 16 We don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life 106 Myth 17 Shakespeare wrote alone 113 Myth 18 Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical 119 Myth 19 If Shakespeare were writing now, he’d be writing forHollywood 125 Myth 20 The Tempest was Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage 130 Myth 21 Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary 137 Myth 22 Shakespeare’s plays are timeless 143 Myth 23 Macbeth is jinxed in the theater 150 Myth 24 Shakespeare did not revise his plays 156 Myth 25 Boy actors played women’s roles 163 Myth 26 Shakespeare’s plays don’t work as movies 169 Myth 27 Yorick’s skull was real 175 Myth 28 Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare’s plays 183 Myth 29 Shakespeare’s characters are like real people 190 Myth 30 Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare 196 Coda 202 Further Reading 207 Index 211
£61.70
The University of Michigan Press Womens Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain
Book SynopsisBrings together the work of scholars investigating questions about early modern British women's figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. They highlight case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence.
£65.50
LUP - University of Michigan Press The Visual Life of Romantic Theater 17801830
Book SynopsisExamines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book reenvisions traditional approaches to artistic and social production.Trade Review“The volume’s thesis, that a substantive investigation of spectacle and the visual elements of Romantic theatre force us to reconsider the primarily textual theses that govern the idea of Romanticism, is both timely and needed. Its transdisciplinary approach, rooted jointly in performance studies and theatre history, promises to reassess the oft-denigrated 6th category of Aristotelian dramatic analysis and unpack spectacle’s aesthetic, political, and cultural significance, both on and off the stage. These are the most important voices in later-eighteenth-century and Romantic theatre studies, and to have them assembled promises readers that this will not just be a collection but a field-defining conversation.” —Misty G. Anderson, James R. Cox Professor of English, University of Tennessee“A field-shaping collection of essays that unveil the lost delights of Romantic-era theatre culture: playbill typography, costume trimming, souvenir fans, toy theatres, stage makeup, mimodrama, and scene maquettes. Through their wide-ranging analyses, the contributors reanimate the stage productions that thrilled Romantic theatre-goers.” —Judith Pascoe, George Mills Harper Professor of English, Florida State UniversityTable of Contents Introduction: Romanticism, Visuality, and the Theater Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson I. Imagined Scenes 1. The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship Terry F. Robinson 2. “Mind-forg’d Manacles”: The Scenography of the Romantic Prison Joseph Roach 3. Some Versions of Spectacle: Worldmaking and the Regency Toy Theater Daniel O’Quinn 4. Conjuring the Space and the Right to Appear in Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) Dana Van Kooy II. Spectacular Bodies 5. “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind”: Visualizing Othello in Nineteenth-Century British Theater Atsede Makonnen 6. Playing “Alive”: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage Sophie Thomas 7. “Dresses in Hand”: Mary Rein’s Costume Workshop and the Spectacle of Romantic Theater Susan E. Brown 8. The Singing Cat: British Audiences, Angelica Catalani, and the Threat of Opera Uri Erman III. Performances in Print 9. The Stage in a Page: A Visual Life of Romantic Playbills Michael Gamer 10. Between Media: Harlequinade’s and Melodrama’s Visuality in Print Deven M. Parker 11. Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, Londina Illustrata, and the Visual Life of Regency Theater Gillian Russell 12. Staging Satire: Gillray and “Caricatura-Sublime” Heather Mcpherson 13. Theatrical Spectatorship in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel: From Oblivion to Redemption Diane Piccitto Afterword: Romanticism is Seeing Ghosts Jonathan Mulrooney Contributors
£69.30
University of California Press Shakespeares Metrical Art
Book SynopsisA poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. It offers a survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.
£999.99
University of California Press Rewriting Shakespeare Rewriting Ourselves
Book SynopsisParticipants in the current debate regarding the literary canon generally separate the established literary order - of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon - from emerging minority literatures. This study insists that the two realms should be brought together.
£24.30
University of California Press Licensing Entertainment
Book SynopsisNovels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. This title shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety.
£27.90
