Search results for ""Author Hilaire Kallendorf""

Chastity and lust, charity and greed, humility and pride, are but some of the virtues and vices that have been in tension since Prudentius' Psychomachia, written in the fifth century. While there has been widespread agreement within a given culture about what exactly constitutes a virtue or a vice, are these categories so consistent after all? In Ambiguous Antidotes, Hilaire Kallendorf explores the receptions of Virtues in the realm of moral philosophy and the artistic production it influenced during the Spanish Gold Age. Using the Derridian notion of pharmakon, a powerful substance that can serve as poison and cure, Kallendorf's original and pioneering insight into five key Virtues (justice, fortitude, chastity, charity, and prudence) reveals an intriguing but messy relationship. Rather than being seen as unambiguously good antidotes, the Virtues are instead contested spaces where competing sets of values jostled for primacy and hegemony. Employing an arsenal of tools drawn from literary theory and cultural studies Ambiguous Antidotes confirms that you can in fact have too much of a good thing.

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Sins of the Fathers considers sins as nodes of cultural anxiety and explores the tensions between competing organizational categories for moral thought and behaviours, namely the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments. Hilaire Kallendorf explores the decline and rise of these organizational categories against critical transformations of the early modern period, such as the accession of Spain to a position of world dominance and the arrival of a new courtly culture to replace an old warrior ethos. This ground-breaking study is the first to consider Spanish Golden Age comedias as an archive of moral knowledge. Kallendorf has examined over 800 of these plays to illustrate how they provide insight into aspects of early modern experience such as food, sex, work, and money. Finally, Kallendorf engages the theoretical terminology of Marxist literary criticism to demonstrate the inherent ambiguity of cultural change.

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It is no accident that some variation of the question 'What should I do?' appears in over three-quarters of the comedic plays of the Spanish Golden Age. Casuistical dialogue was a concern, even an obsession, of Spanish playwrights during the seventeenth century, many of whom were educated by Jesuit casuists. Conscience on Stage is a study of casuistry or case morality as the foundation for a poetics of seventeenth-century Spanish comedias. Hilaire Kallendorf examines the Jesuit upbringing and casuistical education of major playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age, many of whom were also priests, and introduces the vocabulary of casuistry, as expressed in both confessors' manuals and in stage plays. Engaging issues of class, gender, and age to explore scenes of advice-giving and receiving, she demonstrates how the culture-specific construct of 'conscience' in early modern Spain can be recovered by means of a Foucauldian genealogy, which enlists the skills of philology at the service of a larger vision of the history of ideas. This study outlines and reiterates the relationship of theatre to casuistry, the Jesuit contributions to Spanish literary theory and practice, and the importance of casuistry for the study of early modern subjectivity.

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