Search results for ""Author Michael Witmore""
Stanford University Press Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England
Collapsing buildings, unexpected meetings in the marketplace, monstrous births, encounters with pirates at sea—these and other unforeseen “accidents” at the turn of the seventeenth century in England acquired unprecedented significance in the early modern philosophical and cultural imagination. Drawing on intellectual history, cultural criticism, and rhetorical theory, this book chronicles the narrative transformation of “accident” from a philosophical dead end to an astonishing occasion for revelation and wonder in early modern religious life, dramatic practice, and experimental philosophy. Embracing the notion that accident was a concept with both learned and popular appeal, the book traces its evolution through Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Calvinist thought into a range of early modern texts. It suggests that for many English writers, accidental events raised fundamental questions about the nature of order in the world and the way that order should be apprehended. Alongside texts by such canonical figures as Shakespeare and Bacon, this study draws on several lesser-known authors of sensational news accounts about accidents that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The result is a cultural anatomy of accidents as philosophical problem, theatrical conceit, spiritual landmark, and even a prototype for Baconian “experiment,” one that provides a fresh interpretation of the early modern engagement with contingency in intellectual and cultural terms.
£68.40
Cornell University Press Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance
Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments—civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama—or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general. In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era. As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children—and the rich commentary these antics provoked—into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child.
£48.60
WW Norton & Co Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare
In this collaborative work, photographer Rosamond Purcell and Shakespeare scholar Michael Witmore explore the transcendent emotion in Shakespeare's work through photographs, pairing the allusive power of images with the subversive effects of Shakespeare's language. The book takes advantage of oblique connections to reveal things that cannot be represented directly on stage. Purcell has pioneered the technique of capturing reflections in antique mercury glass apothecary jars, resulting in haunting images that seem to move with the liquid quickness of ideas. These images are an attempt to capture Shakespeare's expansive imagination in action—what Coleridge called his "myriad-mindedness": they take a visceral journey into the world of his plays. Witmore has paired each photograph with a short passage from Shakespeare's plays with an uncanny sense of the playwright's intent.
£20.67
