Hilaire Kallendorf – författare

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 Golden 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.

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 Golden 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.

Exorcism and demonic possession appear as recurrent motifs in early modern Spanish and English literatures. In Exorcism and Its Texts, Hilaire Kallendorf demonstrates how this ''infection'' was represented in some thirty works of literature by fifteen different authors, ranging from canonical classics like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, and Lope de Vega, to obscure works by anonymous writers.

From comic and tragic drama to picaresque narrative and eight other genres, possession worked as a paradigm through which authors could convey extraordinary experience, including not only demonic possession but also madness or even murder. The devil was thought to be able to enter the bodily organs and infect memory, imagination, and reason. Some came to believe that possession was tied to enthusiasm, poetic frenzy, prophecy, and genius. Authors often drew upon sensational details of actual exorcisms. In some cases, such as in Shakespeare, curing the body (and the body politic) meant affirming cultural authority; in others, as with Zamora, it clearly meant subverting it. Drawing on the disciplines of literary theory and history, Exorcism and its Texts is the first comprehensive study of this compelling topic.