Aaron Kitch - Böcker

Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

Crossing the disciplinary borders between political, religious, and economic history, Aaron Kitch's innovative new study demonstrates how sixteenth-century treatises and debates about trade influenced early modern English literature by shaping key formal and aesthetic concerns of authors between 1580 and 1630. The author's analysis concentrates on a commonly overlooked period of economic history-the English commercial revolution before 1620-and, utilizing an impressive combination of archival research, close reading, and attention to historical detail, traces the transformation of genre in both neglected and canonical texts. The topics here are wide-ranging but are presented with a commitment to providing a concrete understanding of the religious, political, and historic context in literary thought. Kitch begins with the emerging wool trade and explosion of economic writing, Spenser's glorification of commerce and the Protestant state as presented in The Faerie Queene, and writers such as Thomas Nashe who drew on the same economic principles to challenge Spenser. Other topics include the reaction to the herring trade in prose satire and pamphlets, the presentation of Jewish trading nations in Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the tension between the crown and London merchants as reflected in Middleton's city comedies and Jonson's and Munday's pageants and court masques.

Early modern Europe provides a rich context from which to challenge the rigid opposition between science and religion in this bold new edited collection. Contributors reveal how modes of science or natural philosophy, and religion, were mutually interdependent, even if they were also fluid and contested. Essays break new ground by situating texts and artefacts of early modern science and religion in terms of contemporary scholarly developments, including ecocriticism, postcolonial, race and affect studies. By foregrounding questions of gender, embodiment, evidence and the historical formation of scientific colonialism, this collection locates the early modern body and its empirical study as a source of both religious and scientific knowledge.Essays cover the soteriological body at the heart of Andreas Vesalius’ seminal studies of anatomy, depictions of the hymen in Shakespeare and medical texts and forms of empiricism in John Donne. Where some of the essays address non-literary works, many chapters explore the role of imaginative literature and aesthetics more broadly. Beyond the centrality of Protestant Christianity to early modern European science, some contributors consider the influence of hermetic writings on Francis Bacon and read the Mayan K’iche’ epic of creation known as the Popul Wuj alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost. These inquiries demonstrate the value of comparative perspectives in a period in which radical social, political and religious changes caused a series of epistemic ruptures.