Garland Studies in the Renaissance – serie

The papers published in this book were delivered at two conferences held in conjunction with the exhibition, " The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance"

This book analyzes the Faerie Queene's setting, examining Spenser's quest structures and his ideas about epic, romance, and history. Critics almost invariably treat Spenser's Faeryland as coextensive with the world of the poem, but this is not the case; rather, Faeryland is part of an epic cosmos reaching from heaven and the abode of the classical deities to demonic underground realms. Spenser situates Faeryland within a specific spatial and temporal terrestrial geography in which locations outside Faeryland represent various heroic settings in political history. The politico-historical world built around Faeryland is ripe for analysis by contemporary historicist critics. Spenser uses political geography, in conjunction with the time-inclusive medium of Faeryland, to coordinate several transhistorical quests that create a pattern of temporal mediations among sixth-century British, 16th-century English, and biblical and prophetic versions of history. He juxtaposes chronicle history, empirical historiography, and cultural myth while manipulating genre to create a world capable of accommodating his grand romantic epic design. In mapping the world of The Faerie Queene, the book provides a widened context for Spenser's quest structures, a significant contribution to the study of the poem's relation to history, and a new perspective from which to view Spenser's debts to classical epic, Italian romantic epic, and his native medieval inheritance. Index.Bibliography.

The papers published in this book were delivered at two conferences held in conjunction with the exhibition, " The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance"

How did English dramatists portray the neighboring domain of France and its history in their plays? The study examines a selection of Shakespearean and other history plays, the French tragedies of George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe's revealing historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris, and several literary and nonliterary historical texts. The result is a unique and timely contribution to our understanding of how cultural differences influenced the historical perspectives of English dramatists as well as how Renaissance plays shaped, and were shaped by, their historical material. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, historiography, and ethnography, this study re-examines the historical representation of a neglected yet influential part of early modern Europe and the paradoxical relationship between English writers and their French subject matter. Although information about France and French history was becoming increasingly available in England at the end of the sixteenth century, for English writers France remained a distant land, its history and people misunderstood and misrepresented.

Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), Duchess of Newcastle and one of the best-known women writers of the her time, is enjoying a revival in the wake of Aphra Behn's canonization: She appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature , her poetry will appear in a new edition, and Penguin has recently reprinted her science-fiction novel The Blazing World . This is an edition of her hilarious and rowdy letters, unavailable since their original publication in 1664Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters is a window into the world of 17th-century marriage and daily life displaying a pleasing blend of the comic, the ironic, and the serious. Along the way, the author provides us with the first detailed criticism of Shakespeare's plays, which she defends against the Restoration distaste for low characters. She also comments on food, home remedies, the English Civil Wars, religious fanaticism, street entertainers, churchgoing as a way to find a husband, and winter sportsThis edition offers a full introduction to Cavendish's life and works, a bibliography, and detailed notes, and takes account of hand-corrections made at the author's behest

First published in 1998. This anthology coomprises a diverse range of historical treatises and tracts that discuss and debate gender and sexual relations in early modern England. Combining complete texts and extracts-many hitherto unavailable in modern editions-the collection focuses on prevailing conceptions of sexuality and gender in major areas and institutions of Tudor and Stuart society. A broad selection of religious sermons, moral handbooks, household manuals, midwifery and legal textbooks, ballads and chapbooks has been chosen.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's La tempesta -is a classic pastoral idyll. The rosso stile is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

First published in 1998. This anthology coomprises a diverse range of historical treatises and tracts that discuss and debate gender and sexual relations in early modern England. Combining complete texts and extracts-many hitherto unavailable in modern editions-the collection focuses on prevailing conceptions of sexuality and gender in major areas and institutions of Tudor and Stuart society. A broad selection of religious sermons, moral handbooks, household manuals, midwifery and legal textbooks, ballads and chapbooks has been chosen.

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's La tempesta -is a classic pastoral idyll. The rosso stile is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

How did English dramatists portray the neighboring domain of France and its history in their plays? The study examines a selection of Shakespearean and other history plays, the French tragedies of George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe's revealing historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris, and several literary and nonliterary historical texts. The result is a unique and timely contribution to our understanding of how cultural differences influenced the historical perspectives of English dramatists as well as how Renaissance plays shaped, and were shaped by, their historical material. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, historiography, and ethnography, this study re-examines the historical representation of a neglected yet influential part of early modern Europe and the paradoxical relationship between English writers and their French subject matter. Although information about France and French history was becoming increasingly available in England at the end of the sixteenth century, for English writers France remained a distant land, its history and people misunderstood and misrepresented.

This book analyzes the Faerie Queene's setting, examining Spenser's quest structures and his ideas about epic, romance, and history. Critics almost invariably treat Spenser's Faeryland as coextensive with the world of the poem, but this is not the case; rather, Faeryland is part of an epic cosmos reaching from heaven and the abode of the classical deities to demonic underground realms. Spenser situates Faeryland within a specific spatial and temporal terrestrial geography in which locations outside Faeryland represent various heroic settings in political history. The politico-historical world built around Faeryland is ripe for analysis by contemporary historicist critics. Spenser uses political geography, in conjunction with the time-inclusive medium of Faeryland, to coordinate several transhistorical quests that create a pattern of temporal mediations among sixth-century British, 16th-century English, and biblical and prophetic versions of history. He juxtaposes chronicle history, empirical historiography, and cultural myth while manipulating genre to create a world capable of accommodating his grand romantic epic design. In mapping the world of The Faerie Queene , the book provides a widened context for Spenser's quest structures, a significant contribution to the study of the poem's relation to history, and a new perspective from which to view Spenser's debts to classical epic, Italian romantic epic, and his native medieval inheritance. Index.Bibliography.