Katherine Eggert - Böcker

"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge-willfully adhering to something we know is wrong-resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority.In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.