Renaissance Configurations

Renaissance Configurations

Author: G. Mcmullan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0230378668

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Renaissance Configurations is a ground-breaking collection of essays on the structures and strategies of Early Modern culture - as embodied in issues of gender, sexuality and politics - by a group of critics from the new generation of Early Modern specialists. The essays focus on the relations of public and private, of verbal and spatial, of textual and material, reading and re-reading texts, both canonical and non-canonical, with a textual and historical rigour often considered lacking in work with theoretical premises. The collection as a whole offers a clear sense of the direction to be taken by Early Modern studies over the next decade.


Configurations of Culture Growth

Configurations of Culture Growth

Author: A. L. Kroeber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 1151

ISBN-13: 0520341759

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"This handsome volume, one of a group commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the University of California, caps the prolific and extraordinarily varied publications of the most distinguished of living American anthropologists.... In this book [Kroeber] demonstrates his control over amazing ranges of world history. Kroeber's versatility and intellectual robustness are all the more refreshing when viewed against the background of the narrowness and overspecialization, the relative isolation from the main currents of contemporary thought, and the inbred parochialism which have, on the whole, characterized twentieth-century anthropology. Configurations of Culture Growth deserves those abused adjectives 'great' and 'monumental.' " From: Clyde Kluckhohn 1946 review of "Configurations of Culture Growth."American Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 4, p. 336-341.


Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

Author: Margreta de Grazia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-02-23

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780521455893

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This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.


Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi

Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi

Author: Christine Corretti

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-05-19

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9004296786

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Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, one of Renaissance Italy’s most complex sculptures, is the subject of this study, which proposes that the statue’s androgynous appearance is paradoxical. Symbolizing the male ruler overcoming a female adversary, the Perseus legitimizes patriarchal power; but the physical similarity between Cellini’s characters suggests the hero rose through female agency. Dr. Corretti argues that although not a surrogate for powerful Medici women, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers that Cosimo I de’ Medici’s power stemmed in part from maternal influence. Drawing upon a vast body of art and literature, Dr. Corretti concludes that Cellini and his contemporaries knew the Gorgon as a version of the Earth Mother, whose image is found in art for Medici women.


Bodies and Their Spaces

Bodies and Their Spaces

Author: Russell West-Pavlov

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9042016884

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Bodies and their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre explores the emergence of the distinctively modern "gender system" at the close of the early modern period. The book investigates shifts in the gendered spaces assigned to men and women in the "public" and "private" domains and their changing modes of interconnection; in concert with these social spaces it examines the emergence of biologically based notions of sex and a novel sense of individual subjectivity. These parallel and linked transformations converged in the development of a new gender system which more efficiently enforced the requirements of patriarchy under the evolving economic conditions of merchant capitalism. These changes can be seen to be rehearsed, contested and debated in literary artefacts of the early modern period - in particular the drama. This book suggests that until the closure of the English theatres in 1642, the drama not only reflected but also exacerbated the turbulence surrounding gender configurations in transition in early modern society. The book reads a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts, and interprets them with the aid of the "systems theory" developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.


Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory

Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory

Author: Neema Parvini

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 147424100X

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Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.


Subjectivity and Women's Poetry in Early Modern England

Subjectivity and Women's Poetry in Early Modern England

Author: Lynnette McGrath

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1351726811

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This title was first published in 2002: Combining the approaches of historic scholarship and post-structural, feminist psychoanalytic theory to late 16th- and early 17th-century poetry by women, this book aims to make a unique contribution to the field of the study of early modern women's writings. One of the first to concentrate exclusively on early modern women's poetry, the full-length critical study to applies post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic theory to the genre. The strength of this study is that it merges analysis of socio-political constructions affecting early modern women poets writing in England with the psychoanalytic insights, specific to women as subjects, of post-Lacanian theorists Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Rosi Braidotti.


Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England

Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England

Author: Elizabeth Mazzola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1351871153

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Focusing on both literary and material networks in early modern England, this book examines the nature of women's wealth, its peculiar laws of transmission and accumulation, and how a world of goods and favors, mothers and daughters was transformed by market culture. Drawing on the long and troubled relationship between Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Bess of Hardwick, and Arbella Stuart, Elizabeth Mazzola more broadly explores what early modern women might exchange with or leave to each other, including jewels and cloth, needlework, combs, and candlesticks. Women's writings take their place in this circulation of material things, and Mazzola argues that their poems and prayers, letters and wills are particularly designed with the aim of substantiating female ties. This book is an interdisciplinary one, making use of archival research, literary criticism, social history, feminist theory, and anthropological studies of gift exchange to propose that early modern women - whatever their class, educational background or marital status - were key economic players, actively pursuing favors, trading services, and exchanging goods.


Biblical Women's Voices in Early Modern England

Biblical Women's Voices in Early Modern England

Author: Michele Osherow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 135195539X

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Biblical Women's Voices in Early Modern England documents the extent to which portrayals of women writers, rulers, and leaders in the Hebrew Bible scripted the lives of women in early modern England. Attending to a broad range of writing by Protestant men and women, including John Donne, Mary Sidney, John Milton, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer, the author investigates how the cultural requirement for feminine silence informs early modern readings of biblical women's stories, and furthermore, how these biblical characters were used to counteract cultural constraints on women's speech. Bringing to bear a commanding knowledge of Hebrew Scripture, Michele Osherow presents a series of case studies on biblical heroines, juxtaposing Old Testament stories with early modern writers and texts. The case studies include an investigation of references to Miriam in Lady Mary Sidney's psalm translations; an unpacking of comparisons between Deborah and Elizabeth I; and, importantly, a consideration of the feminization of King David through analysis of his appropriation as a model for early modern women in writings by both male and female authors. In deciphering the abundance of biblical characters, citations, and allusions in early modern texts, Osherow simultaneously demonstrates how biblical stories of powerful women challenged the Renaissance notion that women should be silent, and explores the complexities and contradictions surrounding early modern women, their speech, and their power.


Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England

Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England

Author: Edith Snook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 135187148X

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A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in women's printed devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, and fiction, as well as manuscripts, for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the authors and texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; and Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Attentive to contiguities between representations of reading in print and reading practices found in manuscript culture, this book also examines a commonplace book belonging to Anne Cornwallis (Folger Folger MS V.a.89) and a Passion poem presented by Elizabeth Middleton to Sarah Edmondes (Bod. MS Don. e.17). Edith Snook here makes an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly project of historicizing reading by foregrounding female writers of the early modern period. She explores how women's representations of reading negotiate the dynamic relationship between the public and private spheres and investigates how women might have been affected by changing ideas about literacy, as well as how they sought to effect change in devotional and literary reading practices. Finally, because the activity of reading is a site of cultural conflict - over gender, social and educational status, and the religious or national affiliation of readers - Snook brings to light how these women, when they write about reading, are engaged in structuring the cultural politics of early modern England.