This is Volume V of selected works of Frances A. Yates. Astraea looks at the Imperial theme in the sixteenth century and includes Charles V and the idea of Empire to the Tudor Imperial Reform and the French Monarchy.
This is Volume V of selected works of Frances A. Yates. Astraea looks at the Imperial theme in the sixteenth century and includes Charles V and the idea of Empire to the Tudor Imperial Reform and the French Monarchy.
This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos", Brown innovatively addresses the collection in its entirety. He urges us to see it as a planned whole with a consistent design on the reader: he fully acknowledges, and even brings out further, the heterogeneity of the collection, but he examines it nevertheless as a sustained reflection on the nature of poetry and the auspices for writing in a modern world, distancing itself from the traditions of the immediate past. The strength of this work lies both in the originality of its project and in the precision and enterprise of the close reading that informs its argument. Interest in the concern of Spenser’s poetry with the nature of poetry is in the current critical mainstream, but here the attentiveness is both unusually focused and unusually sustained. Brown garners more than would be expected from the translations in the Complaints, while at the same time including striking and individual chapters on the better known "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos"; he advances understanding of these extremely subtle texts and fully justifies his wider approach to the collection as a whole. Arguing that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is more complex than is often thought, Brown suggests that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by the different texts in the Complaints. He further suggests that the Complaints are a "poetics in practice", which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new poetry that emerges through Spenser’s transformation of traditional complaint.
John Manning's The Emblem charts the rise and evolution of the emblem from its earliest manifestations to its emergence as a genre in its own right in the sixteenth century, and through its various reinventions to the present day.
This study contends that Plato's theory of constitutional decline provides the philosophical core of Shakespeare's Roman works; that Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra form a "Platonic" tetralogy collectively spanning the stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyrrany; that this decline is prefigured and encapsulated in Titus Andronicus; and that all five works are oblique commentaries on England's political milieu. --book jacket.
Treating rhetoric and symbols as central rather than peripheral to politics, Lisa Wedeen’s groundbreaking book offers a compelling counterargument to those who insist that politics is primarily about material interests and the groups advocating for them. During the thirty-year rule of President Hafiz al-Asad’s regime, his image was everywhere. In newspapers, on television, and during orchestrated spectacles. Asad was praised as the “father,” the “gallant knight,” even the country’s “premier pharmacist.” Yet most Syrians, including those who create the official rhetoric, did not believe its claims. Why would a regime spend scarce resources on a personality cult whose content is patently spurious? Wedeen shows how such flagrantly fictitious claims were able to produce a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered the leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle, yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians from one another, and set guidelines for public speech and behavior. Wedeen‘s ethnographic research demonstrates how Syrians recognized the disciplinary aspects of the cult and sought to undermine them. In a new preface, Wedeen discusses the uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011 and questions the usefulness of the concept of legitimacy in trying to analyze and understand authoritarian regimes.
This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.
Conspectus rerum In memoriam THOMAS BAIER, Eckart Schäfer (1939–2018) / INGRID DE SMET, Ann Moss (1938–2018) / JEANINE DE LANDTSHEER, Chris L. Heesakkers (1935–2018) I. Commentationes NICHOLAS DE SUTTER, Triumphus veri amoris and the Reception of Hosschius’ Elegiae in mortem duorum militum Hispanorum (1650) on the Jesuit Stage / PETER GODMAN †, Empathy with Aliens: Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli / THOMAS HAYE, Carlo Vanucio da San Giorgio und die Verschwörung gegen Herzog Borso d’Este (1469) / LUKE B. T. HOUGHTON, Astrae Revisited: The Virgilian Golden Ages of Tudor England / ÁGNES JUHÁSZ-ORMSBY/FARKAS GÁBOR KISS, Leonard Cox’s Pedagogical Commentaries / HANS KILB, Niavis’ Iudicium Iovis – Lukian im sächsisch-böhmischen Bergrevier / WALTHER LUDWIG, Kommentierte Übersetzung der ersten lateinischen Beschreibung Chinas (1588) durch Ioannes Petrus Maffeus, S. J., unter Berücksichtigung ihrer Quellen / WALTHER LUDWIG, Das unbekannte jesuitische Festbuch zur Hochzeit von Kaiser Leopold I. mit der Pfalzgräfin Eleonora (1676) / ŽANNA NEKRAŠEVIC-KAROTKAJA, Widmungsgedichte von Johannes Mylius aus Liebenrode: zum Programm der humanistischen Katechese und religiösen Versöhnung in der Reformationszeit / ROLAND SAUER, Occasura stirps Valesiadum: Schedius Melissus über die letzten Könige aus dem Hause Valois / KRISTI VIIDING, Salomon Frenzels schwere Mission in Riga II. Investigandarum rerum prospectus REINHOLD F. GLEI, Neulateinische Forschungsprojekte / STEPHAN HEILEN/BENJAMIN TOPP, Ein Emendationsbeispiel aus der Arbeit an einer kritischen Neuausgabe von Picos Disputationes III. Librorum existimationes Leon Battista Alberti, Propos de table. Intercenales (JEAN-LOUIS CHARLET) / Michael von Albrecht, Carmina Latina (FIDEL RÄDLE) IV. Quaestiones recentissimae WALTHER LUDWIG, Die unverstandenen Titelseiten der Inschriften Gudes von 1731 / DIETER WUTTKE, Das Celtis-Epigramm I,12 zum Spottnamen des Polen und Schlesiers und seine Vorlage V. Nuntii JEAN-LOUIS CHARLET, XXX° Convegno internazionale Istituto Studi Umanistici F. Petrarca / REINHOLD F. GLEI, Mater Caesaris olim … Das Rätsel um Ovids Ehefrau
This volume explores Shakespeare’s interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience’s most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare’s characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity’s deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity’s potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare’s works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion’s role in our own private and civic lives.